Education of students with visual impairments in Kenya: Trends and issues

Abstract

Until the nineteen hundreds, people with disabilities did not receive formal educational services in Kenya. This paper discusses available educational services for individuals with visual impairments in terms of their forms, materials provided, and educational placements. Areas of most progress are discussed along with obstacles that stand in the way of efficient services for this population. This paper contributes to the rather scarce literature on educational services for students with disabilities in developing countries. Individuals with visual impairments have varying degrees of vision-use for tasks that typically require vision. While some individuals have to use other channels (e.g., auditory and tactile ones) to acquire information, others use vision but only to supplement information acquired through other channels. Another group of individuals with visual impairments includes persons who mainly use eyes to acquire input that is typically acquired through vision but supplement this with input from tactile, auditory, and other senses (Gargiulo, 2003). Legal blindness is a term used in some countries (e.g., the United States) to refer to individuals who must use tactile and auditory senses as their primary channel for acquiring information. Using the Snellen Chart, a legally blind person has a visual acuity of 20/200 or less in the better eye with correction and a visual field that is no greater than 20. In other words, with a 20/200 visual acuity, an individual would have to stand a distance of 20 feet to see what a person with normal vision would see at 200 feet on the Snellen Chart. Field of vision refers to the area that one is able to see left, right, up, and down while gazing straight ahead. A field of vision of 20 or less indicates ability to see objects within a range of at most 20 degrees while a normal eye is able to see objects within a range of approximately 160 to 170 degrees (Heward, 2003 & Gargiulo, 2003). While accurate measurements of visual acuity and visual field serve to determine eligibility for certain entitlements for the legally blind in some countries (e.g., the United States), classifications based on the extent to which students with visual impairments use their visual and other channels for learning are more useful to providers of educational services. Thus, educators speak in terms of totally blind to refer to students who receive no useful information through the sense of vision and must use tactile and auditory senses for all learning. While they may be able to use their limited vision to supplement information received from the other senses and to perform certain