Robert Brown calls for National Transcription Service for Blind Young People

12.00.00am BST (GMT +0100) Mon 12th May 2008

A better deal for blind and visually impaired children and young people was called for by Glasgow Liberal Democrat MSP Robert Brown during a Members' debate in the Scottish Parliament on Thursday. Mr. Brown, who is Convener of the Cross Party Group on Visual Impairment in the Scottish Parliament, paid tribute to the work done in this area by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), and called for a National Transcription Service which could also be used by people with other challenges such as dyslexia.

It is estimated that a pupil will require about 375 educational textbooks in primary school and 750 in secondary school, not counting recreational reading. It can take hours to produce a Braille version of something that might take only 15 minutes to teach. When pupils study for highers, it can take all the time of support staff and more to prepare material for them. To transcribe those textbooks is an enormous task for authorities to undertake, and the picture throughout Scotland is patchy.

As a result, in some areas, blind or partially sighted children often have to wait months for materials and, in some cases, the material never arrives. That severely inhibits their ability to learn and further reduces their life opportunities.

Robert Brown said:

"A national transcription service to co-ordinate the provision of learning materials in alternative formats to all blind and partially sighted school pupils would make a big change for young people with visual impairment at school. If the text is already held electronically, it does not take much to provide additional copies in Braille, large print or even audio and interactive format.

It should be one of the big advantages of this modern technological age that it should be possible to make the same documentation available in different formats at the press of a button. The issue is how we join such a degree of technological possibility with the resource that is made available by different councils, the RNIB and others to make it effective and immediately available to the people who need it, not least in the schools.

It is fair to say that a lot of good work has been done already, primarily by the RNIB. I have immense admiration for the RNIB's campaigns in this and other areas. Good work has also been done by other organisations, such as CARROT in Rutherglen which supplies audio tapes with local news and other content to visually impaired users. Good work has also been done by schools and education authorities, such as Glasgow City Council and South Lanarkshire Council.

Part of the issue is sharing all that resource, and part is making it routinely accessible. Part of the challenge, too, is getting useable materials to blind youngsters at the same time as everybody else gets books or course materials. There is also the challenge of sharing with people with other learning needs. There is also a challenge to the usability of the material across the board because of unhelpful copyright and other restrictions.

A centralised system need not mean a centralised place; it is a matter of joining the resources that exist in various places to ensure that they can be shared, accessed and translated down the wires to the people who want to use them. A national transcription service is an objective whose time has come. The RNIB estimates that 1,100 blind or partially sighted children in Scotland regularly experience difficulties in accessing curriculum materials. They are often children who face challenges beyond the norm, and many of them have problems in addition to their sight problems. Young people have a right to read and we must make that right a reality."