Inclusivity
Background
The World Health Organization estimates that there are 40 to 45 million blind people worldwide, and three times as many people with low vision, about 140 million. In China, there are about 20.75 million hearing impaired people, accounting for 1.67% of the total Chinese population. Of these, 7.5 million are blind. there are about 800,000 children under the age of 7. Shanghai, where our team is based, is one of the largest cities in China and the world. As of September 2022, Shanghai has a resident population of 24.89 million, including about 190,000 people with visual disabilities, of which about 30,000 are totally blind, accounting for 7.6% of Shanghai's total population.
As one of the teams of iGEM, we believe that we should not exclude these disabled people from the iGEM community, but should make them also have access and knowledge related to synthetic biology and iGEM!
Objectives
Our team focuses on the concept of inclusiveness to better communicate synthetic biology and the underlying philosophy of our project to the outside world. We believe that people with disabilities have the right to access expertise, just as normal people do. We want to do our best to ensure that deaf people can easily understand the information we want to share with the public. With this goal in mind, we pay special attention to communicating with them in a language they can understand. For the blind, we print in Braille; for the deaf, we use sign language to communicate.
Survey
Firstly, to gain a systematic understanding of the disability population, we utilized online, on-campus, and off-campus literature resources. We read research papers to delve into the problems and possible solutions of the disabled population with regard to social disconnection.
Discussion of Findings
Firstly, people with disabilities have more or less low self-esteem due to their physical impairments. Although they do not show it in their daily communication, we would like to be careful about what we say and do in order to maintain a pleasant conversation to achieve our promotional goals.
In addition, although there are some companies that offer jobs for people with disabilities, the number of jobs and wages offered are still far below the demand. For individuals, most of them lead a poor life. For the society, this leads to a large amount of idle and wasted human resources. In this context, we believe that our advocacy can open their eyes. Learning more knowledge also makes them become more competitive.
Practical Action 1
We contacted a blind person who knew Braille, Mr. Zhu. After our introduction, he showed great interest in synthetic biology and our project, and said he would actively help us with our activities. To get to know each other better and to show our appreciation, our team members accompanied Mr. Zhu to the hospital. This was because it was very inconvenient and dangerous for Mr. Zhu to walk on the road, and because his guide dog Cinderella, who usually accompanies him, was not allowed to enter the hospital. On the way, we talked a lot about the perception of blindness in today's society, as well as a more in-depth introduction to synthetic biology.
Later, we wrote an article introducing synthetic biology and iGEM and translated it into Braille and printed it out. Through Mr. Zhu, we learned that blind people have their own social networking pages as well as a Shakeology account. So, we decided to record a video of Mr. Zhu reading our article and put it on the page to share it to more blind people we have never met.
We want to lower the barriers to education and give blind people access to free learning resources and fascinating science topics. We also hope that society will provide blind people with more eye-opening opportunities to explore and develop their interest in science.
Agreement from Mr. Zhu
The Braille
Practical Action 2
We were contacted by a school for the deaf and mute who wanted us to go to their school to promote synthetic biology and give the school children a more enlightened view of the world. Unfortunately, because of the epidemic in Shanghai, we were unable to go to the school on site to give an in-person presentation. So, we retreated and created a PowerPoint and promoted it to them in the form of a recorded video. Sign language was dedicated to the bottom right corner of the video for easy understanding by the students and their teachers.
Agreement from the teacher of the deaf school
