COIMBATORE: It’s their ability to touch, feel and hear that helps visually-impaired make sense of their dark world but lack of books in Braille format is making school and college students in Tamil Nadu depend entirely on audio lessons which may progressively affect their sensory faculty. South India Project Director of National Federation of the Blind P Manoharan said though subjects taught in schools and colleges are available in audio format, they do not help visually-impaired students to improve their reading skill.
The students, who stress on inclusive education, had to depend on others due to the shortage of Braille study materials and ‘Orbit Reader’ offered by the government to help read books is in high demand. According to sources, the device can convert texts into Braille format which could be read by visually-impaired students. But the text had to be fed into the device in a particular file format and the device may give a different meaning even if there is a small spelling error in the text.
"Printing Braille books is expensive. Also, a book can be read in Braille by ‘Orbit Reader’ only if it is properly scanned by Optical Character Recognition and not all books are available in that format. It would be useful if the government could scan all textbooks to make them Orbit Reader compatible. The government should also take steps to make Orbit Reader available to all those in need, said R Kamalakannan, a visually-impaired PhD scholar.
G Amirthalakshmi, a BCom student from Coimbatore, said the Orbit Reader is not readily available to anyone and many have to wait for months to get it. "Some Tamil-medium school textbooks are available in Braille but English-medium books are in high demand. As an alternative, we choose Orbit Reader but that too is in short supply. Hence, as a temporary solution, we rely solely on talkback feature on mobile phones and help from fellow students," she said. Although reading lessons in audio format can be easier, it can eliminate the habit of reading through Braille over the years.
“We made several requests to the government to print at least school and college books, but it procures Braille books from private parties on a subsidy basis. The State could start printing Braille books on a large scale as was the case a few years ago when the regional Braille press was functioning at Poonamallee,” Manoharan said.