Thank you very much.
I'd like to first thank the committee for inviting us to come today. I'm Diane Bergeron, and with me is Thomas Simpson.
CNIB has been around for almost a hundred years. We were founded in 1918 to serve veterans coming back from World War I who came back war-blinded and also to serve people who were blinded through the Halifax explosion. We provide services and skills training to individuals who are blind and partially sighted to help them navigate in their environment and be safe in their external and internal environments, and we provide charitable programs, such as peer supports and camps for kids and so on.
We do some advocacy work and we help to educate the public on the needs of people who are blind or partially sighted. The 2012 StatsCan report indicated that almost three-quarters of a million people in Canada identify as having sight loss. That's a lot of people who will be voting in the next election.
I'd like you to imagine that the handout we provided you just before the session started is all the information that you're going to need to determine who the next prime minister of Canada is. This is your document. You can read it, you can learn, and that is the only form of information that you will have to ensure that you make an informed decision when you are choosing who you will vote for in your next election. Understandably, unless anybody here has learned Braille in the past little while, you probably are looking at that document and wondering how in God's name you are going to do that. That is what people who are blind or partially sighted in Canada deal with in every election.
We are often invited to go to debates or to listen to debates on TV, and things are shown—images, documents. We get people coming to our door, doing door knocking, and they hand us documentation that is not accessible to us. We go to websites to look at party platforms. They're not accessible to screen readers and other devices for people who are blind or partially sighted.
It is impossible for me to do what I have a right to do in this country, which is vote for the people who I want to represent me in the political arena. It is also an obligation, but it's impossible for me to do that as a person who's totally blind, and to do it as an informed decision, if all I have to access is a minor amount of information. I have the right as a Canadian to access the electoral process the same as everybody else. Unfortunately, that access is not always provided.
In order to ensure we do have the ability to make an informed choice, we have some recommendations. I'm going to ask Thomas to go through them with you.