Some visually impaired students receiving tertiary education in the country have raised concerns about the e-learning modalities rolled out by their institutions.
According to the students, the new means of teaching and learning which is not quite compatible to them as many of them are not conversant with the use of mobile devices and laptops due to their long-standing visual impairment.
“Special needs students have a way they write their exams. It is not like the way you people [referring to students who can see clearly] can read through and skim and quickly write. They need to read and listen to it. Using the laptop for that one is even difficult” a student shared.
Again the concerns raised by these visually impaired students include the fact that hitherto this move, most of them have been highly dependent on the use of brailles, making the new methods rolled out quite new for them.
Speaking with ghanaquest.com, a student explained that “Not even all students with special needs use laptops to write exams and tests. It’s very few. Majority of them use the braille to write”. He went on to question how students will then go on to be able to write their exams seeing that they depended heavily on these brailles.
With a school like the Unversity of Ghana having quite a number of visually impaired students, the use of their online portal, Sakai has also raised concerns amongst students with visual impairment.
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A student complains ““It hasn’t been easy since the system is challenging and not familiar to us. The interface of the MIS Web students use have been changed. So now, when you open the MIS Web and you want something from the student’s summarized statement of accounts, It will come as an image which for now we don’t have an application that translates images for us to read. Our voice apps only read texts”. The student goes on to add that the online the number of students that log onto the platforms also cause the system to slow down sometimes.”
Another student narrates “Accessing the school website, I also find it difficult because whiles you are in the house, we do assignments on the school website. Then I also find it difficult to access it and submit it. So what I do is that, I call a friend of mine to type it for me. So I make a phone call whiles the friend will be typing on the school’s website to submit the assignment for me”.
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Schooling in Ghana like that of other countries around the world have been forced to go virtual due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 disease which has become a global pandemic.
Whiles students in the past weeks have raised concerns about the new modalities, it turns out that visually impaired students might be facing an even more pressing problem as in addition to all the problems aforementioned they still complain of poor network quality, cost of data and other attendant issues like their colleague students who are not visually impaired have raised.
Clich here to read a full detailed report on this issue.
