Imposing age limits
The Equal Status Act 2000 prohibits discrimination based on the grounds of gender, marital status, family status, age, race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, membership of the traveller community. Yet, there are many instances where the imposition of age limits discriminates against older people who have impaired vision. These include the provision of personal assistants, eligibility for the Technical Aids Grant and even the right to be included on the National Physical and Sensory Disability Database, all of which exclude people over the age of 65.
At the moment just over 11% of NCBI’s service users are aged between 66 and 75-years-of-age, while 49.5% of all those using our services are over the age of 75. As our population ages, it is today’s active, working, 55-year-olds who will require the services of NCBI in the future. These, and many of our current service users, are IT literate and want to continue to use computers, mobile phones and new technologies in spite of their loss of vision. They are hindered from doing so by the strict parameters of grant schemes and the prohibitive cost of buying these items without a grant.