In Touch With the Olympics

With the Olympics and Paralympics now less than one year away, this seems an apt moment to start looking at some of the projects planned to help inspire disabled children in the UK to celebrate and participate in 2012.

A perfect example of a project doing just that is to be launched by ClearVision later this month.

ClearVision is an amazing organisation, with a longstanding relationship with Booktrust. It's a UK postal lending library of mainstream children's books with added braille. As well as having braille (or Moon - an easier alternative to braille), the books have print and pictures, so they are suitable for visually-impaired and sighted children and adults to share. There are over 13,000 books in the collection, including tactile board books, simple stories for young children and stimulating books for newly fluent readers.

ClearVision's 'Touchlines' project will hope to involve blind and partially-sighted children in the excitement of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and to inspire them to take part in sport. This is particularly important given the fact that visually-impaired children are, for a variety of reasons, likely to be less active than their sighted peers.

The project will involve the addition of over two hundred new titles to the braille library. All the new titles are in a sport or healthy living theme. The collection will include new children's books at all levels. For children in the early stages of development, a fabric tactile book with tactile illustrations will spell out in simple rhyme the benefits of a rabbit's lifestyle. Rabbits Don't ends with a little rabbit on elastic so that the child can make it hop, skip and jump across the page.

ClearVision also has one of the world's finest collections of hand-made books with tactile illustrations. For older children, there will be a new specially designed book about the nine Paralympic sports open to totally blind athletes. This book will include embossed tactile illustrations as well as information on how to take part in the featured sports. The design for this book will be available for free download from ClearVision's website. This will enable schools and libraries for the blind in other countries to easily produce their own copies so that visually-impaired children worldwide can share in the excitement of the London 2012 event.

The new collection and the downloadable sports book will be launched on 20th September 2011, when ClearVision will also be celebrating its 25th birthday.

The Touchlines project is funded by the charity VICTA: Supporting blind and partially sighted children across the UK. It has been awarded the prestigious Inspire Mark: the badge of the London 2012 Inspire Programme.

I'm looking forward to reporting on more 2012 projects for disabled children over the coming 12 months.