BHUBANESWAR: With schools and colleges shut due to lockdown, visually-challenged students in the State are a worried lot. Neither do they have audiobooks for all subjects nor alternative study materials like braille texts. The State Government has paid little attention to the educational needs of visually-challenged students. Though the Government has decided to start online education for Class X students through Diksha application after April 14, no such initiatives has been taken up at college level.
“We are still mulling over what should be done for benefit of visually-challenged students,” said Sulochana Das, State Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (PwDs). However, the odds are stacked. A resident of Dangarpada village in Titlagarh, Rohini Chhuria said her education has come to a standstill due to the lockdown. “We could have utilised the time for learning but who will read out the texts to me? My parents are educated. Everyone is maintaining social distancing.
So, I can’t take help of neighbours or friends. I don’t have braille books or recordings,” Rohini, who is a Plus II second year student, said. The State Government gives laptops with pre-installed software for conversion of texts into audio to higher education students. “The laptops don’t have relevant notes or texts on a variety of subjects. Only, the software is installed. In a State where there are no accessible college classrooms or libraries, it’s a herculean task for us to get scanned PDFs of books to feed into the laptop for text conversion.
People charge us RS 1000 for recording small texts. There are several practical problems. So, we don’t use the laptops to a great extent. Rather, we depend on the class teachings or readers,” claimed another visually-challenged graduate Bulu Gantayat, a resident of Berhampur, who is preparing for competitive examinations. In such a scenario, audio books could have helped such students. Most of the students depend on audio recordings of class lectures. “Now, that everyone is at home. Students of different departments should come forward to read out all the books available of Plus II, Plus III and PG. These should be recorded and converted into audio books and uploaded on the website of Higher Education department,” suggested activist Sruti Mohapatra.