If you are a blind person in Grahamstown you will find that keeping abreast of local news is really difficult.
If you are a blind person in Grahamstown you will find that keeping abreast of local news is really difficult.
This is the dilemma that inspired third year Rhodes University student, Lisa Brigham, to propose the idea of creating a newspaper for blind and partially-sighted people in Grahamstown.
By collaborating with Grocott’s Mail and the South African Library for the Blind, Brigham has attempted to start the first community newspaper for the blind in Grahamstown and the first in South Africa to be associated with the South African Library for the Blind.
Did you know? Grocott’s Mail is also available in audio form:
Currently, Brigham is in the final phases of a pilot version of the paper and hopes to have the first edition out this month. The aim of the pilot is to test the idea and work out any issues before committing to the project as a sustainable and permanent publication.
The paper will use Grocott’s Mail content in an edited form to suit blind readership and will be converted into Braille by the South African Library for the Blind. By making the paper completely community funded, blind and partially-sighted people will not have to pay for the paper, making it a true community-service publication.
Brigham says that her idea is based on her goal to get the community involved with the disadvantaged through the local media. She chose the blind members of the Grahamstown community because she feels that they are not being catered for and by using her knowledge as a Journalism and Media Studies student, she could truly empower them. Brigham says “the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rhodes and their outreach work has made me very aware of the value of community journalism and I wanted to give back something very tangible and beneficial before I finished my degree.”
“Working with the staff at the South African Library for the Blind, specifically Noluvuyo Yona, Francois Hendriks and Karen Marechal, has truly made me aware of being charitable and without their co-operation my idea would have never left the plan on paper.” She adds that by using Grocott’s Mail content, the blind readership will not be isolated from the rest of the community.
Despite initial let downs and doubts about her status as a student she says that “when I first went to Steven Lang, the editor of Grocott’s Mail, he was surprisingly supportive of my idea and that really got me motivated to go ahead with the project.”
Brigham says that Grahamstown is a perfect place to start a Braille newspaper because of the “close knit community” and that if the publication is successful here then maybe the idea could be proposed to the rest of South Africa. She hopes that by proving the value of the publication through the pilot, the community will become more aware of the project and help out. “We will need company sponsors to take on the minimal fee of the paper in the future and so the publication’s future lies entirely in the community’s hands.”
