Henry Swaka who is visually impaired, is an activist for people with disabilities speaking to media on 4th January 2024 - credit: Moyo Jacob/Eye Radio

The Advocacy Coordinator for South Sudan Association of the Visually Impaired appealed to visually impaired persons to confront life challenges and stay determined in achieving their ambitions.

Henry Swaka Joseph made the appeal as South Sudan joins the world to commemorate the World Braille Day.

Braille is a tactile representation of alphabetic and numerical symbols using six dots to represent each letter and number, and even musical, mathematical and scientific symbols.

It is used by blind and partially sighted people to read the same books and periodicals as those printed in a visual font.

Mr. Swaka called on visually impaired in South Sudan to acquire education and put more efforts in achieving their ambitions regardless of discrimination that they face in society.

“One has to have determination because my perception is that, whether or not you have disability, you have challenges to overcome and so I look at it that way,” he said, in an interview with Eye Radio on the sidelines of the World Braille Day celebrations in Juba on Thursday.

“Anyone in this world has some challenges to deal with and so if mine is the issue of disability, then, any limitation should not bring me down, I don’t believe in failure and for those who still try to insist or who claim that when you have an impairment you cannot succeed, I would just say they are the ones who are blind.”

“They don’t see the current world and they are ignorant of reality. Except they change because even if they don’t change, that does not stop us from achieving what we can achieve.”

Braille is essential in the context of education, freedom of expression and opinion, as well as social inclusion, as reflected in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

In 2020 in South Sudan, there were an estimated 1.1 million people with vision loss. Of these, 91,000 people were blind.