Invest more in braille technology - Ghana Blind Union to government

Correspondence from the Western Region

The Executive Director of the Ghana Blind Union Dr. Peter Obeng Asamoah is calling on the government to invest more in braille technology to enable blind students to have access to them.

He said there has been a transformation from the paper braille to more technologically advanced ones that students must make use of but due to financial problems, the students cannot access them.

Dr. Obeng Asamoah said this when he was speaking in an interview with Ghanaweb on World Braille Day.

Braille is a tactile representation of alphabetic and numerical symbols using six dots to represent each letter and number, and even musical, mathematical, and scientific symbols. Braille is used by blind and partially sighted people to read the same books and periodicals as those printed in a visual font.

Braille is essential in the context of education, freedom of expression, and opinion, as well as social inclusion, as reflected in article 2 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

World Braille Day is celebrated every year on January 4, to commemorate the birth anniversary of Louis Braille who was born on January 4, 1809, after losing his sight during childhood.

The day is also celebrated to remind the world of the importance of accessibility and independence for those who are blind or visually impaired.

He said, "braille has come to open the educational highway for the visually impaired and we must not end there, we must invest more in the education of the blind child, to give the opportunity to the blind child to have access to technology that will make the blind child go higher in life".

Dr Asamoah said, people now use braille on computers, laptops, and phones but if the government is not able to invest in these technologies, the blind child in Ghana cannot use them, which will be to the detriment of the child.

"Even though these technologies are available, many parents of these children do not have the financial capacity to procure them hence the need for government to invest in them", he explained.

Dr. Obeng Asamoah also called on parents of blind children to take their children to school, as that is the only way the child can learn reading and writing with the braille, adding that "visually impaired children who do not go to school cannot read the braille which is the basics of formal communication".