Opportunities for the blind
WHEN PERKINS SCHOOL for the Blind was founded in 1829, the prevailing attitude was that blind children were incapable of learning. As a result, most children who were blind were not sent to school and many possessed minimal literacy skills.
Today, the expectation is that students who are visually impaired, blind or deafblind in this country will attend school, establish careers, raise families, and contribute to their communities. Still, many blind Americans find their dreams dashed because of attitudes and misconceptions about blindness.
More than 100 years ago, national blindness organizations lamented the low employment rates for people with visual impairments, citing lack of opportunity, uninformed employer attitudes, absence of proper job training, and the lack of transportation to and from jobs. Today, despite significant advancements in many areas, the bottom line has not improved much; unemployment and underemployment rates in the blind community hover around 70 percent.
There is no practical reason for this. Multiple studies have determined that people with disabilities, including blindness, have equal or higher job performance ratings, higher retention rates, lower absenteeism, and no higher rate of injury on the job than their sighted peers. A Rutgers University study has documented that the costs borne by business for providing "reasonable accommodations" to the disabled are minimal, with 73 percent of companies spending nothing.
Misconceptions also are contributing to sharply declining rates of Braille literacy in the United States. A few decades ago, rates peaked at approximately 50 percent but have plummeted today as fewer than 20 percent of students who could benefit from Braille are taught it.
Part of the reason is that most children who are blind now attend public schools that frequently lack the resources to teach Braille, which ironically makes achieving the long-term goal of fully integrating disabled persons into society more difficult.
There is also a growing attitude that the need to learn Braille has been supplanted by technologies that expand communications options for the blind. We embrace the expansion of new technologies to assist the vision impaired, but the argument that these technologies obviate the need to learn Braille is akin to the assertion that, with computers and the Internet, sighted children no longer need to learn to read or write print materials. Braille literacy remains the single most important factor in determining independence and self-sufficiency for people who are blind.
Many disabled children in Massachusetts who have special educational needs attend one of the so-called 766, or special education, schools, which include Perkins. The House and Senate budgets include an inflation adjustment for our state's special education schools. For Perkins, this adjustment amounts to over three quarters of a million dollars needed to help recruit and retain the highly trained teachers and staff needed to work with students and to purchase the highly specialized materials that students require.
Beyond the classroom, an important factor in expanding opportunities for the blind is to make Braille and other print materials more widely accessible. The Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library annually loans 500,000 talking books and 16,000 Braille publications to more than 20,000 people in Massachusetts. Currently the library reaches only about 15 percent of the eligible population, but a small increase in funding would significantly expand access.
Today, there are more than 10,000 children in the country who are deafblind, up dramatically from 4,000 in the mid-1980s. This increase is due to several factors, including an increase in the survival rate of premature babies being born with multiple, complex medical needs. While families are receiving some services in their homes, local school systems, and specialized schools, federal funding for deafblind services has remained constant at $12.8 million since 1990.
In the early 20th century, the accomplishments of Helen Keller opened society's eyes to the abilities of people who are blind and deafblind. We are now in danger of losing some of the ground we have gained.
Those who are willing, able, and eager to learn and work deserve the opportunity to realize their dreams. It is time society embraces our vision that all we see is possibility.
Steven M. Rothstein is president of Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown. 
