USING SWIMMING FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEOPLE

Abstract

This paper shows the limitations faced by visually impaired people in the practice of physical activity. The inclusion of visually impaired people in sports continues to be an obstacle, mainly due to the lack of opportunities provided by the competent sports institutions to this vulnerable group. The purpose of this research is to teach swimming to visually impaired people between 7 and 18 years of age with limited economic resources who have never had the opportunity to interact in an aquatic environment. With a sample of 33 visually impaired children who are part of the Asociación de Ciegos Manabí (Manabí Association of the Visually Impaired), complying with the statistical assumption of normality in non-parametric tests, a thrustone-type estimation scale was elaborated to estimate the level of knowledge that the participants might have regarding the fundamentals required in the sport of adapted swimming. The aforementioned estimation scale obtained an agreement among judges required to obtain a definitive scale, while for the reliability criterion the test-retest reliability principle was applied.  Knowing the level of knowledge of the participants regarding swimming, methodological strategies for its teaching were designed according to their individual learning needs, and in the final stage, the estimation scale was applied again to check the degree of learning of the sample selected to carry out this research.