How tech
brings self-reliance to students with disabilities
Screen readers, maginifiers and
text-to-speech apps have helped reduced the gap in exam results. But there's
much more schools can do, say experts
Rakshit Malik, 18, has every reason to
be pleased with himself. He just scored 96.4% in his Class 12 exam -the
third-highest score in CB SE's disabled category . He treats his visual
impairment matter-of-factly: “My ability is stronger than my disability“. A
humanities student who wants to specialize in history , Malik learns by
listening.He hears the material, pauses, and assimilates it. “While we found audio
versions of NCERT textbooks in Classes 9 and 10, they are not available for
Classes 11 and 12,“ says Malik, who then used his own method. “Mama recorded
herself reading out my textbooks“.
This
year, there was merely a 12-mark difference between the student who topped the
disabled category and the highest scorer in the exam. In many cases, learning
outcomes are aligning, and advances in assistive technology have something to
do with the trend. While it is still essential to know Braille, the system of reading
raised dots by touch is falling out of use in many parts of the world. In the
US, fewer than 10% of the visually impaired read Braille. Now, digital screen
readers and magnifiers, and text-tospeech apps make sure that a blind student
and a sighted one are on the same page. “Tactile diagrams can be used to teach
geography , science and other subjects that require visual aids,“ explains
Nirmita Narasimhan, accessibility expert and policy director at the Centre for
Internet and Society , Bangalore.
As
more learning material is put online, students have it much easier than they
did a generation ago. They also get study notes from peer-to-peer forums.
According
to the 2011 census, 2.21% of the Indian population -around 26.8 million -have
some form of disability . On paper, the state is committed to supporting these
students, and to providing aids and appliances, access to material, scribes and
readers; and easing exam processes.In practice, it is far from smooth, explains
Diana Joseph of the Fourth Wave Foundation, a Karnataka NGO that bridges the
gap between government and students with the Nanagu Shaale programme.“Each
integrated education resource trainer has to oversee 30 schools. So it's often
perfunctory . For example, they may supply hearing tools, without explaining
that the battery must be replaced.“
Over
the last five years, there has been progress in both technology and policy
.Copyright restrictions have been lifted for the use of the disabled. Textbooks
have been proactively digitized. But ultimately , success depends on the
mundane but critical matter of the right standards, explains Dipendra Manocha,
who leads the DAISY for All project in India. DAISY, or Digital Accessible
Information System, is an international standard for printed material that can
be read in Braille, large print, audio, etc on a computer or mobile phone. By
contrast, something scanned as an image file can't be read.
In
collaboration with IIT, Manocha and his colleagues have converted several state
board high-school textbooks into this format, including those of Bihar and
Madhya Pradesh. They're working on it for Rajasthan, UP and Punjab.“Many
organizations are pitching in to do this work, but it would be much easier if a
clear accessibility policy was spelt out by the HRD ministry , which would
apply to all school systems,“ says Manocha. The font must be Unicode-based, the
material must be in ePub format.
Right
now, local languages present a challenge to screen-reading software, says
Narasimhan. “ A basic text to speech eSpeak engine exists for many Indian
languages, but there's a lot of work to be done to effectively deploy it. The
non-adherence to Unicode, and the lack of good optical character recognition
(OCR) software also hinder the effective use of tech in schools and jobs,“ she
explains.
It
isn't just about getting the tools to students, training is also vital. “The
focus in schools has been on helping students through scribes and so on, rather
than letting them manage on their own, as employers will expect from them,“ says
Manocha. There is much more a classroom can do, to enable everyone, says Arun
Mehta, disability activist and president of the Bidirectional Access Promotion
Society . He describes three relatively cheap possible interventions: a
blackboard display with LED marquee lights, a lapel mic for the teacher and
headphones for students with partial deafness or attention deficit, and a board
that vibrates with information from a computer.
Disability
is not just a medical affliction, it is also socially constructed -it is your
environment that includes or excludes you. Technology can melt many barriers if
schools and policymakers can get their act together. Sometimes, that can make
the difference between dependence and independence.
Source | Times of India | 29 May 2016
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
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Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) on April 23,
2016. The title of the paper is “Removing
Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP Treaty”
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