Worshiping with People Who Are Visually Impaired

Over the past few months, representatives from Thrive and RCA Disability Concerns have held virtual listening sessions with individuals who are blind, have low vision, or experience other visual impairments. These sessions have focused on sharing resources, exploring the worship experience from the participants’ perspectives, and fostering a space for peer learning and mutual encouragement.

From these conversations several helpful insights have emerged for worship leaders and church staff. 

The most important takeaway has been the need for direct and intentional communication with people who are visually impaired. 

A closely related request called for worship materials to be shared well in advance, allowing time for sight-impaired participants to review or memorize content before the service.

Meeting these kinds of needs requires churches to proactively ensure that worship materials are accessible. Once a need is identified, it's important to establish a reliable process for consistently providing resources—such as large print or braille—so that individuals won't have to continually advocate for themselves.

A few simple questions for all worship planners to consider emerged from the discussions:

• Will videos that are played during a worship service need explanation or improved verbal introduction?
• Are videos that are planned for use in a service well narrated and/or have closed captioning to work with an audio description device?
• Are clear verbal cues used to signal collective sitting and standing during a service?
• Are responsive readings available in an accessible format and provided before a service begins?
• With modern worship songs, are repeated refrains and/or stanzas clearly noted?

The listening sessions have also served as a platform for participants to share knowledge of resources with each other. While online searching can help an individual find many resources, sharing firsthand experiences about using specific tools or resources is often far more valuable. Participants shared tips about screen readers, useful Facebook groups, and a valuable website library of over 5,000 worship materials in Rich Text Format (RTF) available to people who are blind. RTF files tend to be more compatible with voiceover tools and screen readers than PDF files are. The group also shared accessibility hacks and creative workarounds—describing how to use tools in unintended ways to assist persons with low vision.

Part of the sharing turned into physical gifting as well. A participant offered an older model iPhone to another participant who had no cell phone, promising to hand-deliver it (50-mile bus trip) and demonstrate its capabilities in person. A braille Psalter Hymnal was also made available to any participants who wanted it shipped to them.

Every participant agreed that the sessions were useful, and the facilitators were encouraged to schedule and host similar online meetings in the future.

If you would like to participate in these online listening/sharing sessions, contact Thrive in the Christian Reformed Church in North America ([email protected]) or the Reformed Church in America ([email protected])