Irish Examiner View: Failure to help visually-impaired schoolchildren shames society

In a country as rich as Ireland, there is no recurring funding for a body that could help the 4,000 children in the schools system who suffer visual disabilities.

James Whelan reading braille, at the Sensory Storytime Sessions as part of Braille Reading Day, at Childvision, National Education Centre for Blind Children. Picture: Julien Behal

The story did not command major headlines this week, possibly because it broke the same day as the warning that homecare, disability, and addiction services “face collapse” through an inability to recruit workers at competitive market rates. 

But as an example of societal parsimony and State indifference, it would be difficult to top the evidence provided to an Oireachtas committee about the dire challenges facing blind and visually-impaired children in the nation’s schools.

The joint committee on education heard that pupils who requested accessible versions of junior cycle textbooks could sometimes wait not weeks, nor even months, but years before the learning materials arrived. Sometimes they did not receive them until they were in transition year, by which time the books were no longer needed.

There are some 4,000 children in the schools system who suffer visual disabilities, and TDs and senators heard that access was “a major cause of stress throughout their education”. 

The committee was told that three out of four people who are blind or visually impaired in Ireland are not working, and 90% of recruiters’ websites are inaccessible to them. The largest appropriate digital library is Bookshare Ireland, which can provide 1.2m titles in a variety of formats. While this will have operating costs of €466,000 in 2023, there is no recurring funding, which seems astonishing in a country as rich as Ireland, where the written word is so important.

There is an old saying to the effect that there is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: “To touch words and have them touch you back”.

Nobel prize winner and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan also reminded us: “Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope”. It is for the State to ensure the tools to develop an inner vision are freely available in a timely manner. It is not an enormous ask.