Many organisations are creating learning material but activists believe that a single accessibility policy is needed across school systems

Rakshit Malik, 18, has every reason to be pleased with himself. He just scored 96.4% in his Class 12 exam -the third-highest score in CBSE's disabled category . He treats his visual impairment matter-of-factly: “My ability is stronger than my disability“. A humanities student who wants to specialize in history, Malik learns by listening. He hears the material, pauses, and assimilates it. “While we found audio versions of NCERT textbooks in Classes 9 and 10, they are not available for Classes 11 and 12,“ says Malik, who then used his own method. “Mama recorded herself reading out my textbooks“.

This year, there was merely a 12-mark difference between the student who topped the disabled category and the highest scorer in the exam. In many cases, learning outcomes are aligning, and advances in assistive technology have something to do with the trend. While it is still essential to know Braille, the system of reading raised dots by touch is falling out of use in many parts of the world. In the US, fewer than 10% of the visually impaired read Braille. Now, digital screen readers and magnifiers, and text-tospeech apps make sure that a blind student and a sighted one are on the same page. “Tactile diagrams can be used to teach geography , science and other subjects that require visual aids,“ explains Nirmita Narasimhan, accessibility expert and policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society , Bangalore.

As more learning material is put online, students have it much easier than they did a generation ago. They also get study notes from peer-to-peer forums.

According to the 2011 census, 2.21% of the Indian population -around 26.8 million -have some form of disability . On paper, the state is committed to supporting these students, and to providing aids and appliances, access to material, scribes and readers; and easing exam processes.In practice, it is far from smooth, explains Diana Joseph of the Fourth Wave Foundation, a Karnataka NGO that bridges the gap between government and students with the Nanagu Shaale programme.“Each integrated education resource trainer has to oversee 30 schools. So it's often perfunctory . For example, they may supply hearing tools, without explaining that the battery must be replaced.“

Over the last five years, there has been progress in both technology and policy .Copyright restrictions have been lifted for the use of the disabled. Textbooks have been proactively digitized. But ultimately , success depends on the mundane but critical matter of the right standards, explains Dipendra Manocha, who leads the DAISY for All project in India. DAISY, or Digital Accessible Information System, is an international standard for printed material that can be read in Braille, large print, audio, etc on a computer or mobile phone. By contrast, something scanned as an image file can't be read.

In collaboration with IIT, Manocha and his colleagues have converted several state board high-school textbooks into this format, including those of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. They're working on it for Rajasthan, UP and Punjab.“Many organizations are pitching in to do this work, but it would be much easier if a clear accessibility policy was spelt out by the HRD ministry , which would apply to all school systems,“ says Manocha. The font must be Unicode-based, the material must be in ePub format.

Right now, local languages present a challenge to screen-reading software, says Narasimhan. “ A basic text to speech eSpeak engine exists for many Indian languages, but there's a lot of work to be done to effectively deploy it. The non-adherence to Unicode, and the lack of good optical character recognition (OCR) software also hinder the effective use of tech in schools and jobs,“ she explains.

It isn't just about getting the tools to students, training is also vital. “The focus in schools has been on helping students through scribes and so on, rather than letting them manage on their own, as employers will expect from them,“ says Manocha. There is much more a classroom can do, to enable everyone, says Arun Mehta, disability activist and president of the Bidirectional Access Promotion Society . He describes three relatively cheap possible interventions: a blackboard display with LED marquee lights, a lapel mic for the teacher and headphones for students with partial deafness or attention deficit, and a board that vibrates with information from a computer.

Disability is not just a medical affliction, it is also socially constructed -it is your environment that includes or excludes you. Technology can melt many barriers if schools and policymakers can get their act together. Sometimes, that can make the difference between dependence and independence.

