BENGALURU: While Covid-19 has made all of us rethink the basic human act of touching, the lives of visually impaired people – who rely on their sense of touch to be independent – have been made more difficult as people fear touching them to help.Darshan K B, an employee at a public sector bank in Mysuru, said that visually impaired people like him cannot own vehicles and have to rely on public transport.
"We depend on buses and now, with the need to maintain physical distance, people don't help us board the bus, alight, cross the road... as they used to before the pandemic. When we go to office, there is no one to guide us to the desk and we do not know if the desk is cleaned. We need to touch and feel to survive," Darshan said.
He said that if a visually impaired person contracts Covid, there would be no one to care for them during home isolation. However, he considers himself lucky as he has the option to work from home, although not all banks have given done so.
Kumar Nayak, who recently completed his postgraduate degree in political science, says that while online classes are preferred, not all colleges are accessible to visually impaired people. "Some of us have to take the risk of attending physical classes. Disability-friendly technology in smart phones only hit the market one-and-a-half years ago, but not everyone is tech-savvy enough to be able to use them for online classes and submitting assignments. We need help to get around, but this pandemic has ruled that out for us," he said.
Kumar's friend Diwakar B R, in his second year of a postgraduate degree in journalism and mass communication, said that while technology and apps have made education accessible to them, network connectivity is a problem, especially in rural areas. People with disabilities have been among the worst-affected by the lockdown and pandemic, said Pranesh Nagri, honorary director of Enable India, a Bengaluru-based NGO that works towards helping people with disabilities learn their livelihood.
"During the lockdown, it was difficult for visually impaired people to buy medicines as they could not step out without help, nor were they able to order online as a sighted person can do. We even received calls from people saying they had no food. We distributed gloves, medicines, hand sprays in our network," Nagri said, adding that for the hearing impaired, communicating Covid Dos and Don'ts was an uphill task as most do not know sign language."Even those who are in wheelchairs, use crutches or walkers, require touch, feel and the support of others to move around, get on and off transport and more, which has been missing due to Covid restrictions," Nagri added.