Petition Tag - visually impaired

I was talking with a friend today, he’s got a severe case of visual and hearing loss, meaning he needs support to travel.

There’s a scheme called Direct Payments, that enables him to pay for someone to be his guide (normally around £7.50 an hour) to gets around – e.g., to keep well, to shop, to meet people, to find work, etc.

That does not cover travel expenses for the guide. In other words, he has to pay all the travel expenses for the guide, out of his own pocket. To get to the eye hospital in London, for example, (I’m sure you appreciate that it’s not easy to take a dog guide around London) he would have to pay his own travel expenses PLUS his guide's travel expenses - £36 each for Winchester to London (after railcard discount – a third off), £3.60 each for the Underground (Oyster), and refreshments – e.g., tea/coffee, water, etc. – about £3 each for the whole trip.

£85.20 is the total. All out of his own pocket. On a very low income too. If he was to be a sighted passenger, it’d have been only £42.60.

A large percentage of that is for the train fares. On this Winchester to London route, unlike elsewhere in the UK, there is no cheaper advance ticket.

If guide dogs for the blind can travel for free, shouldn’t guides in the form of human beings too?

If number of people with severe visual impairment and a guide travelling on the train is 1 out of 1,000 (honestly, I’ve never seen any myself), then is it not reasonable to expect the impact to train company’s revenues to be negligible.

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Today, there is in existence a large amount of software and technology, for example screen readers for computers, and voice assisted MP3 players, PDAs and mobile phones. These remarkable devices allow the visually impaired to access far more information, and enjoy far greater opportunities both socially and professionally than ever before.

However, much of this software and technology is produced and marketed by a very small number of specialist companies, who hold a monopoly on these products. This means that they are sold at an extremely high price, meaning that blind people are forced to pay a much greater amount than a sighted person in order to access the same technology. For example, a voice_sense_s, roughly the equivalent of a net book or laptop, is priced at £1300 excluding VAT. Screen reading software for computers is similarly expensive, costing up to £700 per copy. A computer is an essential tool for most visually impaired people, giving them access both to employment prospects, education and entertainment. Yet they are compelled to pay almost twice the price of the computer for the screen reading software they need to be able to use it. This also applies to such universal items as mobile phones and MP3 players. Talks, a software product that makes some nokia mobile phones accessible to blind people, costs £150, on top of the cost of the phone, and the cheapest MP3 player that is really accessible to the blind is around the same price.

Many blind people are, through no fault of their own, either unemployed or on very low incomes, and this technology is for the most part completely unaffordable to them without the aid of charity. Some of us are lucky, and have charities near at hand willing to put up the money, but far more of us are not, and are therefore denied access to essential information and communication technology, which the majority of sighted people, certainly in the developed world take for granted.

Much of this software and technology is essential to visually impaired people if they are to have equal opportunities to sighted people in both the work place and in everyday life. Much has been said about the right of blind people to be able to read the same books as sighted people, at the same time and at the same price. I feel that they also have the right to access the same technology as sighted people, at the same time and as near the same price as possible. And giving that right to as many visually impaired people as possible is the purpose of this petition.

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