Abstract:
Information is power, very important and valuable commodity in everyday human activity as
evidenced with the current digital divide that equal access to information is essential to the
development of information society which also applies to people with disability. The aim of the study
was to establish the information seeking behavior of visually impaired (VI) students at University of
Nairobi library services. The total population of the study comprised of two units of analysis which
were 32 visually impaired students and 6 librarians in charge of the visually impaired students. The
study carried out a survey by means of questionnaires. The study employed Wilson’s (1999) theory
of information behavior model which provided a framework in mapping the student’s information
patterns. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and Microsoft excel 2016 were used to
analyze the data. The response rate was 78.95% from all the units of analysis. The findings
indicated that majority of the respondents 72% were female. The findings further revealed that most
Visually impaired students were getting assistance from a sighted person or by use of computers, speech synthesizers, screen readers, brail prints, and audio books. A smaller number of the
respondents (2.44%) used mobile app called tap tap. The study indicated that majority 68.3% of the
Visually impaired students relied on aiding tools.
