Department of empowerment of persons with disabilities seeks directions to states after the National Federation of the Blind complained that people with visual impairment had to stand in long queues to get tested, vaccinated and get treatment for Covid-19

Following complaints from rights activists and organisations, the department of empowerment of persons with disabilities has requested the Union health ministry to issue directions to states to give priority to people with disabilities in treatment and vaccination for Covid-19.

PUDUCHERRY: People with blindness and low vision are more  vulnerable to Covid-19 infection and have a disadvantage of  not receiving sufficient information about the infection, a   survey by Aravind Eye Hospital in Puducherry showed.

A website of the Samagra Shiksha, Kerala, for children with special needs now has over 1,000 videos related to academics and life skills.

Over 60% of NCERT chapters and over 95% of SCERT books are either totally or partially inaccessible.

For Class VII student Tejasvi Raj, doing his daily homework comes with the double challenge of being a visually impaired student in the COVID-19 era of virtual schooling. His screen reading software can’t access the PowerPoint presentation that his teachers had prepared for online school. E-textbooks provided on the government’s virtual platform DIKSHA, which it has promoted as a transformative resource for digital education, are not fully accessible either.

Groups for differently-abled persons share their views on how to make the polling booths more disabled-friendly

Elections after elections, orthopedically-challenged K. Selvi would crawl to the polling booth at a government school in Vadakkarai near Red Hills. At the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the polling booth became a little less inaccessible, as it offered her a wheelchair. However, without a volunteer to push the wheelchair, Selvi’s sister ended up doing it, while holding her eight-month-old baby.