Chennai:
After two years of continuous struggle, Miranda Tomkinson, a
person with multiple disabilities, wrote the UGC National Educational Testing
(NET) exams on Sunday.
This comes in the wake of a High Court order on Friday which
directed the UGC to provide Braille question paper to Miranda, said S S Smitha
of the Disability Legislation Unit, South, Vidya Sagar. Even University Grants
Commission vice chairman Prof H Devaraj also personally intervened to make provisions
to help Miranda get a Braille question paper.
Smitha said that now UGC has to provide Braille question paper to
all the visually impaired as per the High Court order otherwise it is contempt
of court.
She says printing in Braille is not difficult. “If they can do it
for Miranda why not for others,” she reasons. She says visually impaired people
are now happy with the High Court order in providing Braille question paper.
Raghuraman, assistant professor at Government Arts College,
Nandanam, and also a visually impaired person, said that the High Court
judgement is a landmark one. Now all the universities and colleges should
implement it by providing Braille question paper in semester exams.
However, this is not the end. The next step would be to ensure the
visually impaired be allowed to take their exams through a computer or a laptop
so that they don’t have to rely on the scribe but only on themselves. He said
that the Braille question paper empowers the visually impaired to decipher the
question paper and read out the answer to the scribe. But if a computer or a
laptop is provide then he can read and write down the answer without depending
on the scribe.
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