We are about to see the release of the new Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first mobile phone to come with the Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Android operating system installed. There are some well documented improvements offered by this new system such as unified applications for both mobile phones and tablet devices. There are however some features that are less well known and one of them is the support offered to visually impaired users.

In a room of Furn al-Shubbak’s press club Monday, students practice their radio voice with Antoine Mrad, the general manager of Radio Liban Libre, while some read sample lines out loud from their books.

The Bombay High Court on Thursday struck down a significant provision of the guidelines of the Mararashtra Housing Area Development Authority (MHADA) on its upcoming recruitment examination of visually impaired candidates.

The provision states that the candidate’s scribe must himself have secured a lower score than the candidate in a previous examination or less than 60 percent marks in his examination. The MHADA examination is scheduled on Sunday.

Maharashtra Governor K Sankaranarayanan today launched the first Marathi Encyclopedia for blind children. It has been prepared by the Maharashtra State Vishwakosh Nirmiti Mandal in association with the National Association for the Blind. The function was held at Raj Bhavan, a release said. The Governor complimented the Mandal, its chairperson Dr Vijaya Wad and NAB for "opening the doors of knowledge to the visually impaired children" by producing the encyclopedia in Braille.

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) board has a ’vision’ for its visually impaired students. CBSE wants to encourage visually impaired students to pursue careers in the Science stream.

From this academic year, such students from class XI and XII, will get special question papers without any visual inputs like graphs or diagrams for subjects such as physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics.Instead of practicals, they will have to appear for a multiple choice questions test, which will be based on practical content.

The Government Teachers Training Centre for Visually Handicapped and Hearing Handicapped in Tilak Nagar is in great demand after a landmark judgment from Delhi High Court. This centre conducts a two-year D Ed course for special teachers.

Breaking barriers, a group of Pune-based visually impaired youth are writing computer programmes for a US-based information technology (IT) company to enable it to better sell its cloud computing products. The five visually-impaired youth, who belong to Techvision, the IT unit of the city-based NGO, Niwant Andh Mukta Vikasalaya, are working on integrating the US firm Boardwalktech’s existing Excel platform with emerging spreadsheet applications.

For the visually-impaired students of Bangalore University, lessons will become a tad easier as soon thanks to Shreedhar TS. The 23-year-old visually impaired lad from Karnataka has come up with an innovative idea which will benefit visually-impaired students whose mother tongue is Kannada.

Shreedhar, a second year degree student of Karnataka State Open University has incorporated Kannada script in 'Text to Speech' software, used by the visually-impaired.

The outcome: they can now convert their lessons from English to Kannada without any hassle.

The Gauhati University, in collaboration with NTPC Limited, started an information communication training centre (ITC) at the department of disability study on Wednesday. The aim behind this training centre is to encourage students with disability to pursue higher education in the field of science and technology.

Power minister Pradyut Bordoloi, who inaugurated the centre, said, “It is really a memorable day as such a training centre would definitely help differently abled students to pursue higher education in science and technology.”