Education and visual disability: a literature review

Abstract

Educational policies have been enabling improvements on the admission of people with visual impairment in regular schools. However, in the daily life in schools, difficulties can still be found in the schooling process of these students. The purpose of this study is to analyze the publications referring to visual impairment in the field of formal and non-formal education from scientific articles published in national and international journals. A literature review was conducted, including 66 Brazilian articles catalogued in SciELO, Scopus and Portal de Periódicos da CAPES databases and 142 international articles found in ERIC and EBSCO Host, published between 2005 and 2016. Initially, a descriptive statistical analysis of the national and international articles was carried out and, in a second moment, the analysis of the bibliographic references used in Brazilian articles. The distribution of the publications through the period researched is presented, as well as the designs and methods found, the characteristics of the participants and the journals that published these studies more frequently, comparing the national and international data. The analysis of the bibliographic references used in Brazilian articles, by its turn, enabled the identification of main authors cited and the predominant kind of support and language. It can be noticed that the research have been making progress in the past decades, although there are challenges and tensions that allow new studies and the articulation of themes still little explored.