cover story
Accessibility
students with special needs. But often, institution’s are not aware that they can draw from this fund to upgrade the college infrastructure,” says Nisha Singh. “There were once some special grants being released by the UGC and the ministry. We sent out requests for those. So, we tasked the engineering department to make a tentative proposal for corridors and ramps. Now we are waiting for the grants to arrive,” she adds. Apparently, the implementation of the UGC scheme is yet to take off in a big way.
Absent Students A UGC survey states that 6 per cent of India’s youth study in some sort of HEI or the other. Keeping that figure in mind, and considering that 3 per cent of that figure should comprise students with disabilities, a ball-park estimate of the number of disabled youth enrolled in HEIs should be 3,160,000 (A National Sample Survey 2003 estimate). In a report entitled “Status of Mainstream Education of Disabled Students in India - A Research Study” (www.aifo. it/) conducted some time ago, around 322 universities in the country were sent a questionnaire covering several aspects of accessibility on campuses. Of these only 119 responded. The total number of disabled students studying in the 7,280 institutes under the 119 respondents was 1635. Even according to a conservative estimate, the figure is too low and it appears that Indian higher education is accessible to a miniscule percentage of disabled youth. Now compare this to the US. A July report of National Centre for Education Statistics, US Education Department’s statistical arm, says 88 per cent of their two and four-year colleges reported enrolling students with disabilities in 2008-2009, which means more than 7,07,000 students. About one-third of the students had a specific learning disability. A large number of the institutions (93 %) offered students with disabilities additional time to take exams. Some 71 per cent offered them an alternative exam format. At 77 per cent of the colleges, students with disabilities were provided with note-takers; 72 per cent
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EduTech August 2011
Power Tools JAWS: The programme enables one to work with Lotus Symphony, a suite of IBM® tools for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation creation and with Lotus Notes®. JAWS also is compatible with Microsoft® Office Suite, MSN Messenger®, Corel® WordPerfect, Adobe® Acrobat Reader, Internet Explorer™, Firefox™ and more applications that are used on a regular basis in school. With a refreshable Braille display, JAWS provides Braille output in addition to, or instead of, speech. It comes with an array of versatile features and customisable options. DAISY: “Save as DAISY” add-in for Microsoft Office Word has a “Lite” version of the DAISY Pipeline. One can select to generate the DAISY XML for further processing, or generate a fully conforming DAISY file set with full navigation and full text, synchronised with audio. The audio is generated by the default text-to-speech (TTS) engine on the Windows. Only catch, the source document in Microsoft Word has to be well structured, created using styles and saved before it can be converted to fully conforming DAISY book. Ivona Text-to-Speech: IVONA TTS is a program developed by IVONA Software converting text to speech. It is used in market segments. Its technological potential, high-speech quality comparable with human speech, variety of voices, and licences contribute to the fact that it is used by both large corporations and small enterprises as well as non-profit organizations. RoboBraille: It’s an e-mail service capable of automatically transforming documents into a variety of alternative formats for the visually and reading impaired: Contracted Braille, mp3 files, DAISY books and visual Braille. Furthermore, RoboBraille can convert otherwise inaccessible documents into more accessible formats. RoboBraille is available free of charge to all non-commercial users who don’t need to register in order to use the service. In addition to the traditional email-interface, RoboBraille can be accessed via a simple, accessible web-interface. Adobe InDesign CS4 includes a “\Save as DTBook\” (DAISY XML) option. Users can choose DTBook (aka DAISY XML) content within EPUBs, compatible with the NIMAS standard, mandated in the US for providing access to K-12 instructional materials for the visually impaired.