| Description | Interview with Derek de Vote, RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) training officer. He talks about the standard necessary to be successful on a training course to teach mobility skills (track 1).
Interview with Jane Eliot from Plymouth, audio-typing teacher and mobility trainer at the centre at Torquay. She talks about the loss of her sight and her feelings about this, how she came to work at the centre, and her previous job in television. She talks about relative degrees of blindness and the embarrassment her friends felt about her condition (tracks 2-3)
Interview with unidentified men and women, including Jane Eliot, who talk about teaching orientation and recount stories about re-ordering people's concepts of objects and surroundings, the different methods used with people who have been blind from birth and people who have lost their sight later in life. They discuss the ways that sighted people can help (tracks 4-5).
Jane Eliot continues to talk about her own sight and the extent to which she can recognise people. She describes her view of Charles Parker and talks about her sense of orientation and mobiliy, her sense of word recognition with limited sight and her perception of people's faces by their voices and by spending time with them. She criticises the system of education for the blind and emphasises the need for blind people to be taught basic skills for reading, writing, mobility and orientation to enable them to play a more independent role within the sighted community. She describes the ways she teaches people to familiarise themselves with their surroundings, using traffic sounds, sun and wind direction, and expresses her misgivings about training in the use of the long cane (tracks 6-9).
Total: 33.36 mins
Dubber's reference number: PLA KF549C0065080 |