Since coming to Nepal one year ago, it has been interesting to observe the mushrooming of computer education and training, through schools and training institutes. For many of us the computer is providing a powerful tool, to increase our efficiency and skill. For some, the computer is a way of communicating and integrating their working lives in Society, in a new and exciting way.

A few weeks ago I was privileged to be able to see work being carried out amongst disabled people, at Jorpati. The dedicated staff, were providing medical and rehabilitation services to a group of severely physically disabled adults. The skills being taught, were practical crafts such as knitting, tailoring and typing skills. According to a survey conducted in 1980, approximately 3% of the population of Nepal are disabled (i.e. approximately 600,000). Only a handful of these people were employed, mainly as musicians, teachers and unskilled laborers.

Roughly one tenth of disabled people acquire their injuries through accident or illness, often severely effecting their ability to    work, or even to communicate.

I asked whether any training was given to disabled people on the use of the computer, and was delighted to be referred to Mrs. Shashi Kala Singh, the Secretary for the "Technical & Skill Development Center for Blind  and Disabled". At this center I met with deaf and blind students, from SLC to Undergraduate level teaming computer skills.

The center is equipped with several PCs, incorporating voice synthesizers, and 'Zoomtext' software to enlarge characters. These systems, worked well with the common software application packages, and I was impressed by the ability of the voice synthesizer (which suffered from a slightly strange accent) to read words, sentences or whole documents, and identify menu options to the user. Input and output was assisted by Braille printers and image scanners. Mrs. Singh's belief is that the traditional skills provided to disabled people "are not enough for them to make their life easy and to enjoy equal opportunities in Society". As I watched the students and teachers working together, I became aware how the computer has the potential to add so much to the lives of people with disabilities, and how deaf, blind and able-bodied people had at their disposal a common means of communication. I saw the blind and deaf communicating with one another, and I was impressed by the articles and work they were producing, incorporating use of fonts, English and Devnagari, and graphics.

I believe that this work is important, and inspirational for Nepali Society, and want to challenge Businesses, Schools and Universities, to integrate those with disabilities into the workplace and education system, through provision of the right equipment. For many of the larger employers, the additional cost of equipment would not be too large, particularly as our PCs increasingly support multi-media, and advanced features.
 

Multimedia software, such as Thinkable provides a tool for therapy sessions, where it can be used to assist n restoring the ability to think systematically to brain handicapped people. It tests four fundamental areas of visual thought by using visual images ad image sequences: attention, discrimination, memory, and memory-in-sequence. 
In the box below I highlighted some of the application areas, which are developing and becoming accessible for use with specific disabilities.

Moving towards a Multi-Media PC Environment for all users

Some developments are taking place, which due to their very high cost, are available only to a very few disabled people. I describe these below, because they may show the seeds of technological change which have a general benefit: