NEW DELHI: Delhi University Vice-Chancellor (V-C) Yogesh Tyagi is showing the light to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment to empower visually impaired students. The Delhi University in collaboration with te ministry will provide blind-friendly smartphones with new features.
Under the Government’s Assistance to Disabled Persons for Purchase/Fitting of Aids/Appliances (ADIP) scheme, the phones will be distributed on March 1. The brain behind the project is Features such as audio listening softwares for e-text, e-book, PDF will be beneficial for students to prepare for exams. Students will be able to listen to books, articles and stories with the help of specially installed softwares.
“The initiative is part of a 2015 pilot project but work was not completed due to fund crunch. This time we are speeding up the process,” said Anil Aneja, Officer on Special Duty, Equal Opportunity cell, DU.
In the first phase, over 250 students of low income group will get the smartphones. Softwares will be installed by DU staff and they will train the students on how to use the phone for reading and to convert PDF files into audio format. “NGOs often come up with schemes like this but many students can’t avail of the benefit for some reason or the other. This is a government-funded initiative and hence, students will get the smartphones for free,” Aneja said.
The smartphones priced around `6,000 will have internal memory of 8GB to 32GB. Special softwares such as audio-text, reading books, talk back, audio talk, Eliquence-AUTO TTS (multi-language reader) will be installed.
“Every year over 2,000 students like me take admission to DU colleges. The new phones will be very useful to us in reading and learning,” said Ashwani, a second year visually-impaired student of Kirori Mal College.