[pulsing, ascendent synth music]
You'll remember the saying,
"Knowledge is power,"
So
for us people who are blind,
if we don't get the
information, that means
we don't understand the
affairs of the world,
and we tend
to left behind
from our society.
One of the articles in the CRPD
is access to information.
So we have all the rights
to have access to
to information, accessibility as well.
Not only we have access to
information, but
information needs to be
in accessible formats.
I remember my time when I was at
school. We rely on friends
to dictate our notes
and we gave
the handouts
to our association so that
they can translate
into Braille.
And it took a lot
of time, probably one week
or so, and
our work
was quite behind.
Compared to
students who are
without visual impairments.
[indistinct chatter]
I commenced working here
in 2019.
The Braille unit was already
here and
the first
Braille documents was
the, uh,
the Office of the Electoral
Commission Bill 2018
was in place and already translated
in Braille.
The first project
that we have since I was on board
was the VNR Review [of the UN Sustainable Development Goals],
the second voluntary
national review that was led
by the UNDP [United Nations Development Program]
We have four restaurants.
Restaurant menus.
That's already for
a Braille translation.
So, um,
I think most of the
persons who are blind have
witnessed that ...
one of the milestone.
[mouse and keyboard clicks]
[beeping]
[printer clacking]
[beeping]
[plastic rustling]
Recently we've launched the
Disaster Risk Management
booklet from the Disaster Management
Office, which is now translated
into Braille.
We translated 100
Samoan, 100 English.
The goal is to distribute these
booklets out to the community so
that the blind community
will aware of
what to do and how to
respond with
various disasters, like
how to respond when an
earthquake occurs or
maybe a cyclone.
So we know
things step by step on how to
respond to a disaster
so that we do not rely on our
families to to tell us what to do
because, you know, we might
have some miscommunications, but
now with the Braille unit
we are able for ourselves to
to read and to learn
on how to to cope with
disasters,
and we learned the importance of
climate change and what to do to
mitigate the risk of climate change.
Well, this is the heart of
our work, because this is where
we translate information into
Braille, which is our language
or the language of the blind we can read.
[music fades]