Assistive technologies and the education system in India

E-text materials which are friendly to screen reading software and speechsynthesizers (for people with total visual impairments).Large print/with large font size materials compatible with screen magnifiers (forlow vision people).Should be available in Braille, Daisy book format or talking book format (in MP3and audio) (for the learners with visual impairments and others with a differentinterest in audio materials)E-text should be supplemented with audio-visuals wherever necessary with thehelp of multimedia technologies.The visuals should be further supplemented with captioning (open or close and livespeech) and pictures should be with DVS (Descriptive Video Services) (for learnerswith hearing, vision impairments and for people with various learning disabilities).Use of internet and web accessibilityIn this age of technology, there is no need to going out to collect study materials orattend a conventional educational institution for getting quality education. This couldhappen because of internet and World Wide Web (or, the web) accessibility. Along withthis, Internet facility has minimized the limitations of education. To a large extent, ithelps to make education more accessible for all including the people with visionimpairments. The Web is fully capable of delivering a variety of multimedia andinteractive instructional resources including audio and video services. But, due to someconstraints the students with visual impairments are unable to access graphic images,text formatted in complex ways, Java applets and video clips. In addition, documentscreated by using Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) are difficult to read withscreen readers and refreshable Braille displays. Thus, if materials are provided on awebsite in PDF format, an alternative version should also be available in plain text orHTML format. Of course, this is only feasible for textual information and would notapply to materials, or portions of materials, that are inherently graphic in nature such aspictures, graphs and maps.With some adjustments or changes, the websites can be made more accessible for thestudents with certain physical limitations. A strong effort is being made world over togive more accessibility. For example: http://www.access-board.gov/news/508update.htmis a webpage, in which an effort has been made to give some standards and principlesfor creating accessible websites. Under Section 508, the criteria, rules, procedures and