Berkshire Vision has received a grant from the Access Foundation for £26,637 to help roll out its Equipment and Tech Buddy service aimed at giving visually impaired people greater access to technology that can help them day-to-day.

People with visual impairments are twice as likely to be digitally excluded as the general population, this charity supports hundreds of blind and partially sighted adults and children and is focused on empowering them and challenging expectations of what they can achieve, while educating the public about visual impairment at the same time.

Laura Mitchell, Berkshire Vision’s CEO, said: “An element of this service helps to set our members up on accessible technology.

This could be with using zoom to chat to family or friends, setting up online shopping or using the smart functions on phones and apps to read messages out loud or access websites.

Many of our members have not embraced technology or thought that as a visually impaired person they couldn’t use it; so, this service helps to bridge the digital divide and make every-day tasks easier for our members.

We want to thank the Access Foundation for this grant and look forward to sharing the successes of this service with them. Bridging the digital divide is hard enough and having a visual impairment further compounds that, yet the impact of succeeding in doing so can be exponential."