Commission Displeased With The Neglect Of Braille LiteracyThe Director General of the Nigerian Copyright Commission, John Asein, raised alarms over the dwindling adoption of the Braille literacy system by the visually impaired in Nigeria.
Asein appealed to stakeholders to increase their endeavors, urging the visually impaired to embrace the Braille system more actively.
In Lagos on Thursday, the NCC DG delivered remarks at a digital training program, marking World Braille Day 2024 and paying tribute to Louis Braille, the visionary behind the Braille system.
Braille, designed for blind individuals, is a tactile system for reading and writing that employs raised dots to signify letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks, permitting the representation of diverse letter groupings.
‘We are concerned that Braille literacy is going down. If we say the sighted are not reading, the blind are reading less Braille. This is because many people do not know how to read Braille. Now that they are caught up in the digital era, we have a challenge of whether to go with Braille or to remain with all the software-aided devices. But those who are experts in the process said Braille is also very important.’
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‘Whatever we would do to encourage this, I think we should challenge every stakeholder to ensure that children are still able to read Braille,’ Asein said.
Mr. Opeolu Akinola, CEO of Accesstech Innovation, the driving force behind the training, stressed its objective: to integrate the visually impaired into society by harnessing technology, granting them opportunities equal to those enjoyed by the sighted.
Akinola said, ‘We are marking Braille literacy, which is a system of writing and reading for the blind. We are also trying to make people understand that Braille has gone beyond paper. It is now digital.’
‘The way forward for blind people is to embrace this technology. We are promoting the use of Braille as a literary system and also encouraging people to use these digital devices so that they can easily access the information they need. So today alone, we are looking for the participation of 40 to 50 people.’