The Hindu : New Delhi News : Taking on the visual challenge

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jun 17, 2006

New Delhi

New Delhi

Taking on the visual challenge

Mandira Nayar

Miranda House of Delhi University shows the way

UNDER WATCHFUL EYES: Miranda House is all set to provide learning facilities to students with visual disability.

NEW DELHI: Getting admission to college is only the beginning of an uphill journey for visually challenged students at Delhi University. A marginal section of the over 40,000-student community, they have struggled for years to overcome one of the biggest hurdles in their becoming graduates -- lack of study material.

Not blind to this reality, Miranda House for one has decided to seriously make an effort to give them somewhat of an equal opportunity. The grand old college is setting up the Amba Dalmia Resource Centre for Visually Challenged Students.

This centre will have computers with voice-enabled software like JAWS and Kurjweil. It will have networked computers with up-to-date technology to help students and will also house Braille books.

"Teachers at the college have already started reading out their course material, so that the library has a good collection of audio-books. It was a decision taken by the Staff Council,'' says Nandini Dutta, a senior teacher at Miranda House.

The centre will aim at providing the best facilities for these students. The college, which is starting this project with a Rs.5-lakh grant, hopes to be able to keep adding to this. Taking the concept of the centre seriously, there will be emphasis on moving beyond just providing study material for the students to make them self-sufficient.

Visually challenged students fall under the special physically handicapped category and are clubbed together with disabled students: last year there were 335 students who got admission under this quota. On an average, Delhi University admits about 100 visually challenged students every year.

"This resource centre will be different from a library. The college has also set up an Audio Book Production facility in a specially designed recording room. Miranda House has 13 visually challenged students and a large collection of Braille books,'' says Ms. Dutta.

Apart from providing reading material, the college is also seriously thinking how to improve the "writer'' system for visually challenged students. With students being dependant on their writer to sit for examinations, it is hoping to find a technological solution to this problem.

"The rules of the University state that the writer must be a year junior to them. Technically, the University or the college has to provide visually challenged students the help of writers. But many times we can't do that and students have to find their own writers. Some of these people are not socially motivated and we are not always satisfied with their credentials,'' points out Ms. Dutta.

To overcome this problem, Miranda House is hoping to train students to use the talking software, so that they can read their paper. "However, this will involve lots of training for students and major infrastructure,'' adds Ms. Dutta.

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