A new report for the Royal National Institute for the Blind, completed by NatCen, ‘Circumstances of People with Sight Loss’ describes the circumstances of adults with visual impairment and makes comparisons with the rest of the British population. The UK Vision Strategy highlights the fact that people with sight loss experience a range of inequalities across many different aspects of their lives.
The new study found that:
- Subjective wellbeing was low among people with visual impairment.
- People with sight loss were less likely to be in employment than their fully sighted counterparts.
- Not just inequality, but also discrimination and hate crime affects the lives of some people with sight loss.
The report used two of Britain’s largest longitudinal datasets – Understanding Society – based at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, and the Life Opportunities Survey – to describe the nature and extent of inequalities among adults in Britain in 2010. With the proportion of visually impaired people continuing to increase, analyses such as these help policy-makers to target resources to improve the circumstances of people with sight loss.