OTTAWA—The federal Conservatives have run into a bit of an obstacle in their bid to tell blind Canadians how much they’re doing for them.

They have mass-mailed a flyer with wording that only looks like Braille — without the raised, tactile lettering that blind people need in order to read.

“Supporting Jobs for All Canadians,” reads the slogan on the flyer, the words duly rendered below in a series of Braille dots. But any blind person who touches the dots would find only a flat surface — unreadable letters, then, for many of the roughly 280,000 people in Canada who are visually impaired.

Jocelyne Nicolas, a public relations specialist in Winnipeg, saw the flyer amid her parents’ mail in the Winnipeg riding of St. Boniface. It was sent to their home by the local MP and new Heritage Minister Shelly Glover.

Nicolas snapped a photo of the flyer and put it on Twitter this week, saying the “mailer about accessibility has a PICTURE of Braille on it. How very sensitive and supportive.”

Some of Nicolas’s friends in Winnipeg told her the flyer was also sent around Elmwood-Transcona, riding of Conservative MP Lawrence Toet. It also surfaced in Peterborough, home to MP Dean Del Mastro, and in Ottawa West-Nepean, home riding of Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.

“It’s shocking to me that a party that big, and that well-funded, could be putting out something so ignorant,” Nicolas said in an email to the Star.

Jim Tokos, a vice-president at the Canadian Council of the Blind, said he found the flyers simply “baffling” — especially since the whole purpose of the pamphlet was to boast about how much the Conservatives were doing to make life easier for disabled people in Canada.

“Our government has been determined to help remove barriers for those who are excluded from the workforce,” the flyer states. “Our long-term prosperity depends on an inclusive workforce that utilizes the skills of all citizens.”

No one at Conservative headquarters replied to questions on Friday about how the party ended up putting fake Braille on the flyers or about how many Canadian households would have received them.

The flyers, known as “householders” are made up in kits by the Conservative research bureau and then distributed to MPs who can customize them with their own photos and contact information and send them out as they please.

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