Royal National Institute For Blind People Research Launch

Main Category: Eye Health / Blindness
Article Date: 02 Oct 2008 - 2:00 PDT

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On 30th September, RNIB launched a new report on the 'Labour Market Experiences of People with Seeing Difficulties - a Secondary Analysis of the Labour Force Survey' (LFS).

This research, undertaken by the Institute for Employment Studies, provides us with a recent picture of the demographic characteristics and employment opportunities for working age people with seeing difficulties.

Overall, this research shows that people with seeing difficulties are relatively well qualified and a higher than average proportion of those that are in work, are in high level occupations.

However, the overall employment rate for people with seeing difficulties is low, and even lower for people who are disabled by their sight problems. If they have additional disabilities or health problems the employment rate drops even lower.

The research also shows that people disabled by seeing difficulties have a higher unemployment rate than other disabled groups. Additionally, it finds that while 45% are economically inactive, a third say that they would like to work.

The findings from this research indicate that employment strategies need to be better targeted towards understanding and addressing the needs of these different groups.

To note, Network 1000 research also provides recent evidence for the employment opportunities of people with visual disabilities. However, it focuses on people who are registered blind and partially sighted. The LFS sample, whilst it should exclude people whose visual problems can be corrected by glasses and contact lenses, most likely represents people with a broader spectrum of visual loss.

The Executive Summary and Research Briefing, along with the Full Report, can also be downloaded from this web link: http://snipurl.com/3zmn0

RNIB