by Kurt Nielsen
Vice-president of the Danish Association of the Blind
and Vice-chair, EBU Commission on Mobility and Guide Dogs
Paper given at the EBU Mobility and Transport Conference held in Paris on 14-15 October 2002
I want to introduce my speech by saying that blindness and visual impairment is a very severe handicap, what specific consequences the authorities of the public and the private society must fulfil its obligations to limit or to remove by legislation or by the good will.
The specific consequences of blindness and visual impairment are the loss of the possibility to use ordinary daily living skills. Not to have access to the ordinary printed written lauguage and the loss of the capacity to go along alone for your own private purposes independently and safely, and this is, what we call good mobility skills.
What can be done to ensure, that blind and partially sighted people can regain another capacity of mobility skills.
I hope the following will give the participants of this EBU conference on mobility and transport an answer.
In order to obtain a successful rehabilitation of mobility those initiatives must be incorporated. I will in this connection mention four initiatives.
- Information,
- qualified education and training,
- high qualifications of the mobility instructors,
- commitments to education and training by legislation.
Information
There must be circulated detailed information available about the local, the regional and the national supply of MOBILITY training organised according to the individual needs. And at last but not least information about the necessity for blind and partially sighted people to have good mobility skills in order to motivate them to start mobility training.
I can fear that a sufficiently strong motivation is not available especially for the great number of elderly, newly blind and partially sighted people. It is a great problem in itself. Qualified information to the different target groups can contribute to solve this problem, I am convinced.
The organisations, the institutions and the schools, which introduce mobility training must be obliged to disseminate this information.
Mobility education and training
From the point of view of the consumers a qualified education and training in mobility must include the following aspects :
- To motivate and to strengthen the accept of the necessity to improve the mobility skills, and to give the clients good knowledge of the certain strategy to remove the psychological barriers to present him/herself as a blind or a partially sighted person enabled to go along without assistance from another person as the guide.
- To train the specific techniques of mobility by using the different mobility aids IN A SUITABLE WAY. In this connection the white cane and the guide dog must be underlined as excellent mobility aids both of them used by many people through out the world.
- To learn to identify the many different and useful tactile, audible and acoustic distinctive marks, which are a necessary guidance, when the visual distinctive marks are not available.
- To learn the management of using the many different mental maps of the physical surroundings.
- And to use the specific accessibility equipment established in many cities, suburbs and in country districts. It concerns tactile paving, sound crossings, information systems by beacons on elected places in the surroundings.
Qualified instructors
A precondition of the qualified training is a qualified staff of mobility instructors in a sufficient number. In many countries it is a great problem to provide such qualifications in this area.
In Denmark the Institute for Blind and Partially Sighted People in Copenhagen once a year organise a special education of instructors in mobility and in daily living skills. For the time the education is organised in four sections. Section 1 for introduction and information to this work field. Second 2 deals especially with visual impairment. The section 3 is teaching the clients in subjects concerning daily living skills in theory and in practice, and the section 4 is teaching in subjects concerning mobility skills in theory and in practice as well. The whole concept of this education runs over 37 weeks. We are still discussing new ways to improve the education for the benefit of blind and partially sighted people in Denmark.
Legislation
In our country in the late 70's a law was passed in the Danish national parliament, which commits the regional counties to offer special need education to physically and psychologically handicapped people. According to this legislation mobility training is organised in Denmark.
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