Creating an Enabling Environment for Persons with Disabilities: Sensitizing the society on the use of assistive technology to facilitate information access for persons with disabilities (original) (raw)

Access to information is one of the key requirements in today's modern life. We receive information through major sensory channels like ears (hearing), eyes (seeing or sight), touch (contact through skin or tactile), nose (smelling or olfactory). Often persons with disabilities (PwDs) are having impairment in one or more of these senses leading to sensory disability. They are unable to gather information from the surrounding environment through these gateways of knowledge (Maria Montessori, cited in Scherer, 2002). Hence it becomes imperative to have alternative means to gather information. Thus we see the blind using tactile means to gain information, those with hearing loss using sign language or visual mode of information and some like persons with deaf-blindness relying on both tactile as well as specialized techniques like Tadoma. Assistive Technology (AT) plays a major role in empowering individuals with disabilities to gain and use information just like anyone else. The B...