It is estimated that over 285 million people are visually impaired across the world while 200,000 people in Sri Lanka are believed to be blind and these numbers are on the rise thereby making the need for awareness a critical one.
The Blind Walk is one such campaign which was organized by The Project Vision in Bangalore, India which organized a Blind Walk which was held concurrently in four countries – the USA, China, India and Sri Lanka.
The concept of the Blind Walk has become a very meaningful program to promote the donation of eyes.
The idea behind it is to give people the experience of being blind, where people with vision can experience the very demanding challenge of being visually impaired thereby spurring them to help create awareness about this cause.
Ada Derana, Sri Lanka’s No. 1 entertainment channel which hosts Sri Lanka’s most visited news website, joined this force in a very innovative way.
In a first for Sri Lanka and probably the world, Ada Derana changed its logo to a Braille font with the message ‘Blind to comprehension while you have sight – Comprehension only dawns when you go blind’.
Speaking about this initiative Mr. Madhawa Madawala, Executive Director/COO of Ada Derana said, “We only realize the value of sight after we lose it.
Given that blindness is on the rise around the world, eye donations are urgently required and we were determined to play whatever role we could to raise awareness of this plight.
We felt that changing our logo to a braille font would surprise our thousands of visitors to Ada Derana and thereby help to spread our message to everyone with sight.
Mr. Thariq Thulba, Past District Governor of Rotary, and the Chairman of the organizing committee thanked Ada Derana for coming on board to support this cause saying that he appreciated media organizations getting involved in projects such as this and urged other media outlets to support this initiative as well.
