Ceylon Today: Awareness-creation on vision impairment of the elderly
Long years ago, a Native American leader said, ‘you can dig
as deep as you want but there’s one thing you will never find on the lands we’ve
lived on: a home for the elderly.’
There was a time when the elderly were not considered
liabilities. They were seen as
repositories of knowledge, libraries in fact.
Even today, there are people in this country who will not equate
‘infirm’ with ‘inability’. And yet,
we’ve come to a stage where we have had to mark a special day to talk about the
elderly, their difficulties and what kind of action needs to be taken to make
their lives easier to live. are all kinds of ailments that afflict the human
being. Naturally, the older one gets the
more vulnerable one is to disease and accident.
Old people can’t get about as easily or as quickly as young people do. This is why many elderly persons take up
reading or at least spend more time reading than they used to when they were
younger.
And yet, in the rush to get in as much reading material as
possible on a page in a newspaper, editors pick smaller font sizes. It’s almost as though they have counted out
people with poor eyesight as potential readers.
Worse, maybe it doesn’t even cross their minds that such a category of
readers live in our midst.
It is in this context that ‘The Nation’ celebrates the
decision by Ceylon Today to use a font 70% larger than usual on one particular
day in order to highlight the problems of those with poor eyesight and
especially the elderly.
Ceylon Today has recognized the elderly and has alerted the
young to the inevitable fact of old age and vision impairment that awaits
them. We recognize and applaud in
turn.
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