Constraints in Conducting Survey Research among Visually Impaired Undergraduate in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The first and foremost entry point to information access is sight. Being equally adequate to the privilege of sight is not the case at all illustrations. Being visually impaired can affect this accessibility to direct information. The boulders in accessing information has been considerable blurred out to a certain level but there still exists instances such facing face to face interviews, distribution of questionnaires and collection of context based result sets, etc. The main objective of this paper is to identify the constraints when the researchers do the survey research among visually impaired undergraduates in Sri Lanka. The obstructions that have considerably marked a footprint in this sphere are listed out as deficient time periods as the visually impaired clients are supposedly depended upon others to elucidate the contents of the questionnaire in order to fill the required which takes them around at least an hour to complete, language barriers, lack of data from the visually impaired clients, extraneous or redundant data collection due to the existence of barrier to get through to these clients past their visual impairment, the lack of sustainable data that can be utilized for future references, dearth of equipment awareness due to the absence of the privilege of sight and hands on experience with such equipment. As far as the analysis part is concerned, there’s an unavailability of established standards to compare the data provided by visually impaired students against those provided by others. Hence, assumptions are made without passable data to measure against with. This paper tends to traverse through to the core with the intentions of identifying the underlying issues that could be considered as probable causes and strives to propose plausible recommendations that could try in its best within its entirety to serve as solutions to these issues.