For more than 40 years, Mrs Chan Leung Yuet-ming, Grace has been championing unrelentingly for more opportunities for the visually impaired in various aspects including housing, education, rehabilitation, employment, as well as sports. She aspires for an inclusive society in which the visually impaired can live with dignity, self-esteem and — as her Chinese name implies — happiness and brightness.

Mrs Chan has worked with The Hong Kong Society for the Blind since 1973, until retiring from the position of Chief Executive in 2007. She resolutely strived for compassionate public housing for the blind, introduced rehabilitation and vocational massage training for them, and advocated for barrier-free facilities in public transport. She also helped the Guangzhou School for the Blind in its curriculum design and in teacher training by introducing navigational and sighted guide techniques, as well as teaching and counseling skills for the visually impaired of international standards.

Mrs Chan was appointed as the honorary Chief Executive Officer of the Asia Foundation for the Prevention of Blindness from 1987. The Foundation has been supporting developing countries in Asia to embark on various programmes in blindness prevention and sight restoration. It also launched the China Mobile Eye Treatment Centre (METC) project in 1995 to promote, on semi-trailer trucks, blindness prevention, free cataract surgery for the needy and training for county hospital doctors in remote areas of the Mainland. So far, 33 METCs have reached 23 provinces to provide cataract surgeries for nearly 370,000 patients and train over 18,000 local doctors. The Foundation has set up four Education Resource Centres in four Mainland provinces to promote inclusive education, which have enabled some 20,000 underprivileged visually impaired children to receive education in mainstream schools within their vicinities, and helped train about 1,000 local teachers.

Retirement has not restrained Mrs Chan from working with the visually impaired. In 2008, she helped establish the first local non-profit-making sports organization specifically for the visually impaired, now named as the Hong Kong Blind Sports Federation. It pioneers equal participation and sports for all, and helps visually impaired athletes to participate in local and overseas tournaments. The Federation also arranges school visits for visually impaired athletes to share their life experiences of self-reliance, so as to instill positive life perspectives into the youngsters and to advocate for social inclusion. Mrs Chan aspires to add more sports varieties (including archery, goal ball, tandem cycling) this year to the six kinds of sports training now run by the Federation. Furthermore, she is working enthusiastically on blueprints for developing outreach training programmes for blindness organizations with an aim to train up 200 visually impaired athletes in marathon, football and golf in the coming two years, and to select elite visually impaired athletes to represent Hong Kong in the Paralympic Games.