Charity HERIB Wins National Award

 

Local sight loss charity HERIB has won a national award at the recent Visionary Conference in Birmingham.

Visionary is a national infrastructure organisation for all local sight support charities in the UK. The awards evening took place as part of Visionary’s national conference which offers local societies the chance to share information and knowledge, network and make new contacts as well as listen to key note speakers from within the sight loss field.

HERIB was nominated for three awards and, given the strength of competition with entries from across the UK, was delighted to receive the Best Use of Technology Award which was accepted by HERIB’s Chief Executive Sandra Ackroyd who said,

“We’re delighted to receive this national award and it’s wonderful for the HERIB team to be recognised in this way. This award reflects the hard work that our Training Officer, Tracy Atkinson, has been undertaking in developing our Assistive Technology Suite, offering one-to-one training both in the suite itself and at people’s homes and facilitating ‘Techshare’ workshops for visually impaired people. It also reflects our work with other local organisations to deliver courses such as family genealogy.”

HERIB currently supports almost 2,300 blind and partially sighted people across Hull and East Yorkshire of all ages and with a wide range of eye conditions.

Training Officer Tracy Atkinson said;

“Our aim at HERIB is to ensure visually impaired people can access the same opportunities as fully sighted people and our assistive technology training programme can help them to do just that by teaching them how to utilise some of the adapted technology on equipment like smart phones, tablets and computers. Often this helps them to carry out simple tasks such as online shopping or using Facebook, which most sighted people would take for granted. ”

“I couldn’t do any of this without HERIB,” said one recipient of the technology training. “It’s great that they can help me and teach me how to use my iPad. I feel I will soon be able to communicate with and play games with my friends.”

Using information and assistive technology has become a key skill for everyday living, enabling access to services, products and leisure opportunities as well as education and employment.

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