For the visually impaired, navigating through neighborhoods can be a struggle, but apps aim to shed light on places, people, and obstacles that lie in their paths.

There are 285 million visually impaired people worldwide, about 39 million of whom are blind, according to the World Health Organization.

Guide Dots, a free app for Android, detects a person’s location and uses audio voice-overs to announce nearby attractions, including restaurants, shops – and even friends.

Anxious and a bit nervous but confident are just some of the words that can be used to describe students of the Guyana Society for the Blind, (GSB) who are preparing to write the upcoming Caribbean Secondary Education Council, (CSEC) examinations.

To be honest, I did not know what to expect, as I sat down to chat with the group of visually impaired students, the first batch to take on the task of publicly displaying their intellectual capabilities by entering to write the exams.

There is no dearth of promises for the disabled in the manifestos of both the Congress and BJP. But if the data on the proportion of the disabled who have been issued disability certificates is any indication, they need all the help they can get — starting with the basics. A mere 38% of those identified as disabled in Census 2011 have been issued certificates, the basic document needed to access everything — from education and healthcare to job reservation and all manner of welfare schemes.