Helping the Blind
In all stadiums built for Euro 2012 there will be special seats equipped with headphones for blind people and their guardians. “There is already such equipment at stadiums in Manchester and London, and also in Austria and Switzerland (developed for Euro 2008). But Poland will provide twice as many seats for blind people,” says Katarzyna Meller, spokesperson of PL 2012, the company responsible for organising Euro 2012. “What is more, their seats will not be placed in a different sector but among able-bodied fans. We do not want them to feel isolated, alienated and pushed aside”. Up till now, blind people have not been coming to matches; what would be the point of coming if they cannot see anyway? “The most important thing is to become a part of the show and feel its vibes. I always come home from a match, hardly being able to speak from all the shouting,” says Marcin Kaczorowski, who is blind, once a Łódź Widzew masseur and now a loyal fan. “When I was a part of the club’s medical staff, the team’s manager or the other masseur would describe to me what was going on on the pitch. Sometimes I guessed myself, hearing the referee’s whistle, players’ shouts or the crowd’s reaction. These days, I take a radio to the match and with one ear I listen to the live coverage of the match on the radio, and with the other to the sounds coming from the pitch,” says Marcin.
At stadiums in Warsaw, Gdańsk, Poznań and Wrocław, which are preparing about 50 seats for the blind and as many for their guardians, radios will not be needed. There will be headphone sets provided and live coverage will be transmitted for the blind. “It will be a more descriptive coverage than the one you hear on the radio,” says Tomasz Strzymiński from the Audiodeskrypcja foundation, being a blind fan himself. “A commentator has to know what a player wears, what exactly they do, where the ball is. He has to know not only that somebody kicked a ball but how he kicked it, so that a blind person can ‘see’ the match in their heads. Instead of names and stories we need to be told what is happening”. Two years ago, thanks to his initiative, during a match between Jagiellonia Białystok and Zagłębie Lubin, for the first time 17 blind fans had the chance to come to a match. “That match made us realise how much there is still to be done. I heard the radio coverage myself and I know what is needed now in radio coverages for blind people. These days there is lack of annotating experts in Poland. We need to find them before Euro 2012,” says Strzymiński. Katarzyna Meller reassures us that all will be done before the championships as the costs of European-standard commentator training will probably be covered by UEFA.
Wyborcza.pl
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