The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : These employees set their sights high

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Sunday, Mar 23, 2008
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

These employees set their sights high

Kannal Achuthan

Human resource managers find visually challenged persons dedicated and less distracted

— Photo: M. Karunakaran

ENABLED: A visually challenged person displays her technical prowess at the annual day celebration of the Welfare Foundation of the Blind in Chennai on Saturday.

CHENNAI: Head honchos of IT and IT-enabled services companies are looking favourably at making visually challenged persons part of their firms.

Human resource managers from companies such as TCS, CTS, HCL, Wipro, Virtusa and Mero Consultants interacted with visually challenged persons at the annual day celebrations of the Welfare Foundation of the Blind here on Saturday.

S. Karthick Kumar, manager at KPMG, an IT solutions firm, said the visually challenged were “dedicated, loyal and stick to the job”. They were also less distracted than other employees, he added.

With JAWS (Job Access with Speech), a software that reads what is on the computer screen, the visually challenged can work with the Microsoft Office package. They could work as customer relations executives, medical transcriptionists, data operators and even programmers.

Healthsoft India’s chairman and managing director K.C.S. Anand said his employee B. Venkatesh, who is visually challenged, finishes more work in less time compared to many of his colleagues. Four visually-challenged persons have been working as medical transcriptionists with the firm since 2002.

Visually-challenged Srinivasan is employed as a programmer with Ma Foi consultants. Although the process took some time, he has now progressed to working with latest software technology such as .NET.

Self-training

Most visually challenged persons employed in IT and ITES firms said they were self-trained.

“Many more people want to be trained. They are also willing to pay for it. Yet several training institutes don’t take in visually challenged candidates,” said V. Sivaraman, secretary of the Welfare Foundation of the Blind (Ph: 22750896/1402).

He urged recognised training institutions such as CSC Computers and NIIT to take in visually impaired students.

Basic knowledge of computers and the Internet has also helped the visually challenged to network socially. Muthuselvi, a law student, and Suresh, a programmer with HCL, demonstrated how the JAWS software helped them read e-mails and chat messages.

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