Just as there are certain things that the Chinese mainland (and indeed the whole world) could learn from Hong Kong — such as the workings of our super-efficient banking and financial sectors, not to mention our wonderful MTR system — so there are many other areas where the mainland’s approaches can take the lead. 

Few other countries, for example, can match China’s solid success over recent years in conducting widespread and lasting poverty-reduction activities for millions of its most needy people. Emulating best practices seen elsewhere should surely be a key focus of governmental authorities, anywhere.

As we learn from New Doors Open for the Visually Impaired in China (China Daily Hong Kong, Aug 16), welcome developments in the field of producing Braille texts are resulting in more employment opportunities for the mainland’s millions of visually impaired citizens. Once again, we are seeing the mainland’s policies to aid its citizens as a shining example of what more yet needs to be done here in Hong Kong, to boost the opportunities available to our differently abled residents.

For the differently abled, including the blind, the chance to hold down a regular job is of vital importance. Being able to contribute to society in that way enhances their sense of self-respect and self-worth, and offers them dignity, as well as helping to make them financially independent, not to mention minimizing their need for welfare support from various quarters. Most of Hong Kong’s differently abled citizens are obliged, by their lamentable lack of employment opportunities here, to uncomfortably existing as a financial and social burden on their families, despite their kind family members being very willing to support them.

They need to be helped out of that unsavory predicament. We would find that, despite their having been dealt an unlucky card in the “game” of life (by their disability), such fellow-members of our society would be only too willing to do their level best to contribute at the workplace, if only they were to be given the dreamed-of chance to do so. Many decades ago, I worked in England as a young civil servant. Even back in those days, the government service there rightly made ample provision for offering jobs to the differently abled. I recall to their great credit, that my differently abled staff members, by contributing a 110 percent effort to their job duties, generally outshone in their work performance the other staff members who were not so physically challenged.

Hong Kong’s civil service, to its great credit, does offer many jobs to our differently abled citizens. Unfortunately, this approach is not yet as widely seen as we would like in the commercial sector in Hong Kong. Obliging our biggest employers to offer a certain percentage of their jobs to the visually impaired and to others who are differently abled, as a type of positive discrimination, would do much to get all our working-aged citizens into productive and renumerated employment, and so enhance the lives of the differently abled while minimizing the burden on our welfare services. This would most certainly help bring about a more harmonious and congenial social environment. Let us see our new Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government take the lead, in legislating for such changes, with a view to enhancing the lives of our thousands of differently abled citizens and their family members.

To counter the widespread general ignorance about the needs of Hong Kong’s differently abled citizens, as well as to provide a better appreciation of the challenges they face each and every day, this area of concern could usefully be addressed by the arrangement of presentations, as part of their school and college social studies curriculum, by differently abled spokespersons. Greater understanding of such things should lead to greater sympathy and better provisions for them in the wider society. If these sessions could include activities such as having the students walk around the school or college gym or grounds while blindfolded, they would do much to enhance awareness by the students of exactly what blind people have to cope with every day, as they make their way around our crowded and busy city.

We can observe also, the physically challenged here supporting others in the same boat. For example, the Hong Kong Federation of the Blind, a nonprofit self-help NGO, offer a program whereby their longer-term blind members help to train the newly blind in the vital skills of coping with normal daily living.

All in all, those of us lucky enough not to be physically challenged need to ditch the outmoded preconception that the disabled are unable to do this or unable to do that, in favor of welcoming the differently abled into the workplace and elsewhere, on the basis of positively encouraging them for what they can do, rather than dwelling on what they can’t do; and of supporting the offering of such opportunities to those who so badly need them.

The author is honorary lifetime adviser to the Hong Kong Federation of the Blind.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.