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Robert Ndlovu
This is a continuation of the discussion from last week that highlighted the extent to which ICT technologies enable and accelerate economic and social inclusion of people living with disabilities. In this week’s article we seek to explore available ICT technologies that can be used by people with different forms of disability.

Access Devices and Gadgets — People are diverse! Some people are not able to use the “standard” devices that you or I use in our every-day lives like standard keyboard and mouse and/or Android Phone or iPhone as we know it. As a result special gadgets have been especially designed to bridge these benefits.

These are the “wheel chairs” of the tech world. The gadgets are designed to address different impairments that different people have that include — visual, auditory and motor. The last refers to those with challenges in movement.

Some disabilities mean that the input   devices themselves need to be placed at convenient locations for the person either on their wrists or on the wheel chair arm. Some are totally different and depend on the challenge the person living with a disability has.

For example there is what is known as a puff-sip switch which is placed into the lips of the person and connected to a computer which will understand different puffs and sips as input signals into the computer.

Mind you a computer system works by accepting a key stroke on a keyboard or phone pad or a puff on a straw and sends it to the CPU for processing and an output is generated in the form of printed text on the screen , an audio file or/and electrical signal. The sequence is input-processing output.

Output devices now come in handy for people with both auditory and visual challenges. A simple every day example that you can relate to is the Whatsapp screen that you look at almost daily from your favourite chat group.

Because you have always done it this way, really it might be difficult for you to imagine receiving your instant messages in another manner. But that does not mean those are the only modes or receiving the messages, only that those are the only ones in that you are most familiar with. If you know what Morse Code (if you don’t Google it) then what we talking about here will make more sense.

Speakers and microphones can be very useful for visually impaired people in terms of text-to-speech systems.

The text-to-speech system takes in text as input and then outputs speech to a set of speakers. Just note that nothing has changed in the manner which the computer works.

Input can be puff, text, audio, phone key stroke and be concerted into speech which can be listened to by an end user. The selection of the right gadgets depends on the limitation or type of disability facing the end user.

There are a number of FREE text to speech software programmes that enable any text on the screen to be selected with the keyboard or mouse. It is then spoken back to the user in a computer generated voice such as www.naturalreaders.com . The list is endless. Google them and most are free. This means that you can download audiobooks to the phone of a person with a disability. There is no rocket science here really.

Radio and TV would have topped of the list for broadcasting this but the greatest challenge is quality and nature of the content. We do not have content curators for people with audio/visual challenges but we churn out about 10,000 varsity graduates annually from the institutes of higher learning.

We believe with the licensing of 13 private radio stations we will get more quality local content not just content. People are not going to listen to your stuff just because it is local. Add value to it. I would rather watch Tom & Jerry cartoons.

Affordable gadgets are available in tech shops.  There is nothing to invent. If in doubt consult a physician to quantity the nature of the disability or disabilities the person you are trying to assist. As I mentioned in last week’s article that it is NOT meant to be an exhaustive one stop shop, but it will help you know what and where to look for as long as you understand the three key areas of challenges faced by people with disabilities stated above (that is visual, auditory and motor).

This is not a complete list but a fair attempt to solve problems at the level at which they occur.

Now an interesting technology for this write up would be the Braille keyboard and printer – Braille is a writing system for blind and visually impaired people. It is made up of raised dots that can be ‘read’ by touch.

A Braille keyboard is a specialist input device that allows the user to type and enter text or instructions for the computer in Braille. The image on the left shows a Bluetooth powered Braille keyboard that can connect to a computer, smartphone or tablet (if they are Bluetooth enabled). The device on the right is also Bluetooth enabled and can link to access packages such as MobileSpeak, Talks and modern operating systems.

A Braille printer operates by embossing raised braille dots onto braille paper. Pins are pressed into one side of the paper in order to create raised dots on the other side of the paper.

I will stop here in so far as hardware and software to help end users is concerned. And now to the tricky part of costs, skills and resources. This is where again we invoke, we request and we politely demand that the powers that be in this case the Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology and Courier Services, Social Welfare Department, Ministry of Health and Child Welfare, POTRAZ, BAZ and the three Mobile Network Operators namely: Econet, Telecel and Netone, get their heads together via an all stakeholder conference and address this. Why the telco operators?

They could offer discounted rates for data downloads for applications and software. Why Ministry of Information Communication and Technology?

The Ministry must set aside a portion of the budget from the local software development fund that they have launched which we are told will be around $20 million. And BAZ?

Well they dished out licenses and that is great. But they can encourage and reward content producers to produce content for this group.

ZTV for a change has made a spirited effort to have sign language during news time. But I am certain it will not take more than a week to produce some samples for the deaf and blind.

National University of Science and Technology and Midlands State University students could come up with Facebook kind of thing for the blind via audio files using an IVR system that uses DTMF (phone keypad).

Show us you are there on merit!

The story would be incomplete without asking The Chronicle to investigate how ICT is being used in several institutions that teach the disabled like the Jairos Jiri center located in Bulawayo.

For views and questions contact the writer on email: Ndlovu @ Ymail.Com or cell: 077 600 2605.