Sweden - 2 News items from Sweden

1. A new questionnaire April – May 2017.

The Swedish Association of the Visually Impaired, SRF, is always keen to learn more about the conditions and experiences of its members. For this reason a questionnaire will be used to gather information from 1000 persons from all over the country. The questions will mainly focus on the situation in the streets, the traffic and on trips, but also use of services provided on computers and Internet in general. 

The survey will be carried out by a well-known enterprise in Sweden. People from our membership register will be randomly chosen to interview. They will also be selected to get balanced results considering both young and old, men and women, blind or partially sighted and so on and so forth.

The aim of the survey is to evaluate the results of our advocacy work, as well as increasing the knowledge of the situation of the visually impaired. Furthermore the results will be compared with the outcome of a very similar survey from 2015.

In brief the findings of 2015 were that the usage of the Internet was less than what was expected. And fewer people than expected were able to move around and cope with the traffic challenges independently.

This time we hope to deepen our knowledge and hopefully discover some results from our campaign in the autumn of 2016, called 'A street for all'. This campaign was in many ways a spin-off from the survey of 2015.

Questions on the Survey will be answered by Kaj Nordquist

Phone: *46-8-39 92 91 e-mail kaj.nordquist@srf.nu

2. A forthcoming campaign

The Swedish Association of the Visually Impaired, SRF, is going to Campaign for employment rights. There is a need to change the attitudes of employers to the potential of blind and partially sighted employees.

Currently only 55 percent of our members are employed. And amongst those who are unemployed 60 percent think they never are going to enter the labour market again.