Dearth of Usable Books for Visually Impaired University Students towards Developing the Literacy Skills.

A research paper presented at VICLIS - Virtual Conference on Library and Information Sciences - 2021 

*1, Kasun Nayanajith, 2 Sathya Nirmani, 3 Warsha Ranasinghe

1 , Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Nugegoda. 2 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Nugegoda. 3 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Nugegoda. 

*sjpkasun@gmail.com wsnirmani@gmail.com kusumwarsha@gmail.com

Abstract

Books are valuable sources that improve a person's literacy skills. In particular, using books would enhance the reader’s creativity, writing style and spelling, among many other life skills. The persons with visual impairment and blindness have limited capacity to use books designed for sighted people. Documents presented in the form of brail and audio helps the persons with visual impairment and blindness to overcome this difficulty. Computer based screen reading systems also provides much help in this respect. However, not like in the Western world, books and publications that are useable by the persons with blindness are very rare in Sri Lanka. This situation is not conducive for the academic and other developments of the persons with visual impairment and blindness. Accordingly, this research aims to explore the existing situation with respect to availability of brail books for university undergraduates in Sri Lanka. The focus of the study is on the availability of books in Brail media. The objective of the research is to explore the language errors caused by the dearth of brail books. This research adopted a qualitative approach and adopted the interview method for data collection. In order to represent the study population, 20 university undergraduates each with and without visual impairment and 10 brail translators were interviewed. Data analysis was done during a period of a month in January 2021. Results indicated that there is a total number of 80 university students with visual impairment and blindness. The available number of books for these students is apparently inadequate. For an example, the number of brail books available at library of University of Sri Jayewardenepura is 50 whereas there are around 400 audio books available for the use of university students. To conclude with the significance of these findings, it was identified that the lack of brail books causes the students to make errors in spelling and discourse.