NEW WAYS OF LANGUAGE LEARNING FOR THE BLIND OR VISUALLY IMPAIRED CHILDREN

Learning a foreign language is important for everybody, particularly if your mother tongue is not very widespread, and given the demands for communication skills in modern society, including Internet. Language learning is even more important for visually impaired people, in order to reduce the gap caused by lack of sight or from severe visual impairment. Visual impairment affects every sphere of human life, both as an individual and as a member of a community. Visual impairment affects all domains of human activities, including communication, mobility, human relationships. This is still truer in our society, dominated by image and rapidity. Mastering a foreign language, in particular English thus becomes a sort of “bridge” through which the visually impaired person can have access to different cultures and to different opportunities in the domain of social contacts. The word, in the case of the visually impaired person, has a much greater importance than by sighted people, because speech is the only communication modality for human relationships. Body language, movie, image communication have to be translated into spoken or written words, in order to be grasped also by the visually impaired.