Using ATMs in the city is a task for the visually impaired, as most banks do not have Braille and talking machines, despite instructions from the RBI to make changes. It has been two years since Veena Kumari (35), has been requesting a bank for a debit card. The bank refuses to give her one claiming that she would not be able to recognise the PIN number on the card, and would require assistance to conduct transactions.
Hundreds of children who could only listen to Tagore’s works can now read them as well, thanks to a gift on the eve of his 150th birth anniversary.
Nine city schools for the visually challenged on Sunday received two copies each of two volumes of Gitabitan in Braille along with 21 other Bengali and English storybooks to mark the occasion.
Members of the Indian Institute of Architects (IIA) have begun a survey of all government buildings, as per High Court directives, to check if they are barrier-free and convenient for the differently-abled.
This spring, Patty and Terry Horvath took 46 blind travelers on a Caribbean cruise.
The owners of Best Cruises & Tours in Grand Blanc, Mich., let participants pay $20 a week in installments for months or years to pay for the trip. They subsidized seven volunteers to accompany the group. They arranged special shore excursions on Nassau, St. Thomas and St. Martin. They kept the price as low as they could, pairing up the mostly solo travelers in double rooms.
Their biggest contribution? Serving a completely passed-over market — blind travelers on a budget.
New research from McMaster may answer a controversial question: do the blind have a better sense of touch because the brain compensates for vision loss or because of heavy reliance on their fingertips?
The study, published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Neuroscience, suggests daily dependence on touch is the answer.
Even the skies don’t care for blind people in India. After Kingfisher Airlines recently made a woman get off a flight because she was blind, we ran a reality check on other domestic airlines and found that contrary to international practices, most carriers in India do not allow blind people to travel independently.
When we called the tele-booking counters for Jet Airways, Kingfisher, Spice Jet, Go Air and Indigo, requesting to book a ticket for a blind adult who would travel unaccompanied, all of the above refused.
He started learning classical dance when he was only 7. Now at 22, Lingaraju, the only male artiste in Samarthanam's Sunadha dance troupe, is an accomplished dancer.
He has performed in Australia, Italy and the US and at prestigious events like the Hampi and Anegundi festivals in India.
That may sound ordinary, but there is something special about him. He has achieved it in spite of having a partial visual impairment.
India’s print media is among the largest in the world. More than 25 per cent of the world’s blind population is in India.
Yet, India’s 12 million visually impaired people do not have a daily newspaper dedicated to them.
In a small way, Swagat Thorat has been trying to change that. Thorat started working with the blind in 1991 when he conceptualised and wrote a documentary about educational methods for the visually impaired.
In 1997, he made Swantantryachi Yashogatha, a play that featured 88 visually impaired artists, a world record.
A high-flying city executive, who has travelled across the world and helped frame disabled-friendly guidelines for Indian airports, hit an air pocket at Patna last week when a private airline insisted he sign a bond before allowing him to board. The apparent reason: he is visually impaired, and was travelling alone.
In 1928, Jawaharlal Nehru decided to open Indira's eyes to the world. He wrote to his 10 year-old daughter from Allahabad and filled his letters with what amounted to history lessons. The batch of 30 letters that makes up "Letters from a Father to his Daughter" was first published in 1929. And now, a brand new Braille version will reveal their contents to the visually impaired.
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