Education, training and employment were singled out as the utmost important issues for the integration of visually impaired in the mainstream of society. A sheer number of population still is in darkness due to lack of awareness and access to the information related to special education for blind people. The method of teaching to blind people is the Braille script- ‘the Braille script is used by the blind for reading and writing. Each Braille character or “cell” is made up of six dots, arranged in a matrix of dots. A dot may be raised, giving a total of possible combinations for 6 dots. Blind people use touch to read the raised dots. This kind of reading is known as “tactile reading” or reading by touch. Braille cells are read from left to right, regardless of the language they are used to encode’.
We at Antardrishti have been devoted towards the empowerment of visually impaired for the past six years. During the course of our efforts we found that India is facing an acute shortage of trained teachers in Urdu Braille scripts and also there are no such tools available in Urdu languages in India and reason why the blind people who want to read and write Urdu, can’t learn Braille in the outreach area. Despite of all the efforts made by Government and non-government organization, people with blindness in India are not able to access to Urdu Braille.
We followed up our study by informal interaction, workshop, and brain storming session with educationist, school teachers and social workers and felt that urgent need of preparing an Urdu handbook for Parents and teachers of visually impaired children that enables them in simplistic yet holistic manners to address this issue.
we are working on developing a handbook which can help parents and teachers of blind children.
This handbook will be addressing both the teachers and parents/guardians so that they could help the visually impaired children who want to learn how to read and write Urdu. The use of such a handbook will not only be economically viable but also be socially acceptable model to bring all those unreached blind children into the mainstream of education.