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[Kevin Prince spoke at the Heathcote Valley Community Association's recent Annual General Meeting.]
 Kevin Prince lives in Avoca Valley and is employed by the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind. A major part of his job is to visit workplaces, where sight-impaired people are employed, and modify the equipment they use to best suit their abilities, often with some very innovative results.
With a population of around 2000 people in Heathcote, approximately 40 of us are likely to be visually impaired, based on national trends. It is these people that Kevin is able to help.
Given the employment available in Heathcote, namely horticulture, retailing, manufacturing and catering, I asked Kevin where visually impaired people are likely to be working? "Typically administrative type jobs, anything computer based. I know blind lawyers, teachers, and people working in cafes, retail, IRD, call centres and data processing. There's no defining characteristic, it's limited more by what the person's other skills are."
Kevin is able to make these jobs easier in a number of ways. "Say you are working in a call centre, we would customise a magnification programme. If you can't click with a mouse, we'd use a keystroke. We can recommend changes to the work-flow, so instead of scanning something, we capture it as text so it is in an accessible media."
There aren't any call centres in Heathcote of course, so I asked Kevin about the area's horticulture, retailing, manufacturing and catering. "I know of a waitress who works in a cafe. The only adaptation she needs is special light on the till. If you are working in horticulture and you became blind late in life, you will already know your plants. Why shouldn't you carry on? It might be hard to start from scratch though."
With this last thought in mind I asked Kevin about the problems our Heathcote jobs would create for the visually impaired. "In manufacturing, the perceived problems would be moving machinery and forklifts. All that can be worked around though, by skills training such as not leaving things in the gangway because John may trip over it, and not working with machinery without the guards down. For horticulture, if you're on the tractor John might not know you're coming."
I wondered if it was possible for a visually impaired person to get work in the traditional Heathcote employment of horticulture. "You would need a supportive employer, and that's usually half the problem. Some plants can be identified by touch, so if you're going down the row, you can spot the dandelion, just by touch. Maybe you're not as quick, so you might have a problem with your productivity rate."
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