Pacific Training Centre for the Blind Society

The Pacific Training Centre for the Blind (PTCB) is a national-award-winning charitable organization founded and run by blind people. The centre serves blind, deafblind and low vision adults in Greater Victoria and elsewhere of all ages from young adults to older seniors.  

At the centre, instructors, who are blind themselves, teach nonvisual independence skills such as Braille, adaptive technology, cane travel, cooking and other life skills, and help students to develop positive strategies for living with blindness and vision loss in a sighted world. 

The PTCB was recently accredited by the Commission for the Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF) and is the only accredited blindness-service in BC. 

The centre provides its signature program, Blind People in Charge, for no cost to blind adults; it is the only program of its kind in Western Canada that offers regular, intensive rehabilitation to adults who are blind or who are losing their vision. Blind People in Charge is also the only program that uses an empowering, problem-solving model of instruction, called Structured Discovery, where  blind people teach and run the program. Since all instructors, the Executive Director and most of the board members are blind, students learn from people who have actual lived experience of being blind; they gain confidence and raise their own expectations of the capabilities and potential of blind people.  

The program involves a collaborative, positive, and empowering approach to blindness, in which blind people learn from and teach each other in a supportive, can-do atmosphere.