At the beginning of July, myself and a few friends descended on Birmingham to attend the annual Sight Village exhibition.
This is a central hub, hosted by the Queen Alexandra College where exhibitors from charities, technology companies and everything in between come together to show off their services or products aimed at blind and partially sighted people.
The exhibition lasts two days and this year was held at the Eastern Rooms.
I last attended Sight Village Central in 2010 and so much has changed within the blindness sector, particularly from a technological point of view but some things remain unchanged.
I registered for my tickets for both days, which was very straight forward. I also registered my interest for several seminars held over the two days and this for me, was where the organisation felt slightly short. Once Ih ad ticked my preferred seminars and submitted, I heard nothing so when I arrived on Monday morning, I, like many others, did not know which seminars I could attend or indeed where or when they were being held. Despite this, I did manage to attend most of the ones I wanted to over the few days.
You also have access to a sighted guide who can help you get around the exhibit hall and to the seminars with ease. This has always been a super strong point and utilising young people from a nearby college seemed to work brilliantly.
On the Monday I found a guide and headed into the exhibit hall and spoke to a few exhibitors before heading off to my first seminar. I have to say, I would like the seminar and list of exhibitors in advance, maybe with the tickets just so I have access to the information. As a side note, I have just seen I could have downloaded the docs pertaining to these exact things on the website but I had not scrolled that far down so maybe having a note in the ticket email to say you could download those things would have been hugely helpful.
The seminars I attended on Monday were:
Seeable holidays, National Rail, WiWalk and Getting tactile with Braille.
They all offered a great insight to each service or product and I felt these were well put together by the individual exhibitors.
After lunch, we ended up chatting to a few friends which is one of the plus sides in this particular venue as there are a lot of seating areas spread around which enable people to sit and chat if they wish.
Day two, I spent more time in the exhibit hall and visited most of the technology stands I wanted to.
In future posts, I will highlight exhibitors I found of interest but just wanted to give a little overview of the experience.
Having the young volunteers, particularly when they are engaged with you or the things you are visiting is really helpful. I found my day two volunteer is helpful and he was even asking questions. There was a few things organisationally which could have been done better, and I felt check in was a little chaotic. Also, not even sight village staff seemed to have a clue where we could take the dogs for a toilet and was down to someone else within our group who knew where they had taken their dog previously.
I enjoyed it overall and I probably will visit next year.
Marie Howarth