Parent Link with Lois Strachan

Lois Strachan will be sharing valuable insight on parenting children with disabilities, based on her own experiences with her parents. Lois became blind at the age of 21 as a result of insulin dependent diabetes. Since losing her sight she’s completed a Bachelor of Arts degree and an Honours degree at UKZN. She feels that if people understood more about how a person with a disability is able to live a productive life, there would be greater levels of inclusion of persons with disabilities into society and the workplace.

Lois Strachan is a speaker, author, blogger, podcaster, disability consultant and sometime rock musician whose purpose is to show that disability does not mean inability.

As a disability consultant, Lois’s work includes training customer service teams on how to engage with visually impaired customers effectively and without anxiety, assessing the accessibility of websites and online materials, and raising awareness of the abilities of persons with disabilities to facilitate increased employability. 

Lois is the host of A Different Way of Traveling, a podcast on accessible travel, for the Accessible South Africa platform.

In 2016 Lois published “A Different Way of Seeing: A Blind Woman’s Journey of Living an ‘Ordinary’ Life in an Extraordinary Way”, a memoir in which she shares some of her experiences since losing her sight and describes how she accomplishes tasks. In 2014  she published a series of illustrated children’s books “The Adventures of Missy Mouse”, which explain to children that a person who is blind is simply a “normal” person who does things in a different manner, In 2015 she was awarded a Tributes Excellence Award in the category of Education and Literature for her work.

In 2008/09 Lois was elected as District Governor of Toastmasters International for Southern Africa, an organisation that helps people develop communication and leadership skills, serving the needs of around 2500 people in 9 countries in Southern Africa.

Lois has also started working in the field of accessible travel, helping the tourism and hospitality industries to accommodate those with special needs to make South Africa a destination of choice for travelers who are differently abled. She is a travel writer who writes a regular feature on travel for “the Blind Perspective”, a USA-based magazine.

Lois lives in Cape Town, is married and has a guide dog who helps her travel around independently.