Accessibility in India – mainstreaming issues

I had the privilege of going to a conference on accessibility in education. As some of you know, I have been involved in a project with universities for many years (Liberated Learning - -www.liberatedlearning.com) This is a consortium of some 20 universities worldwide, that are trying to make classrooms more accessible for deaf and hard of hearing students (and others), using speech recognition to caption lectures. I envisioned perhaps engaging an Indian university to join the consortium, and open up mainstream education for deaf and hard of hearing students.

Reality check. Someone involved in deaf sign language in India gave a presentation. He pointed out that deaf children in India don’t start learning sign until age 7, which leaves them pretty “non-lingual” until then. And seven years old is too late to start learning your first language. The kids end up reading on a 2^nd grade level, and generally don’t graduate high school. I imagine that there are virtually no deaf students in college, then. This dilutes a key “selling point” for Liberated Learning….there is no value in captioning lectures for deaf/hard of hearing students if:

1. they aren’t getting into college anyway
2. they have 2^nd grade reading skills

Discussions with another accessibility expert at the conference exposed more attitudes towards disabilities and treatment of people with disabilities in India. She said that the Hindu belief in reincarnation and karma reduces the urgency people feel to remediate and intervene for children with disabilities; it introduces a belief that the disability is the person’s “cross to bear” (to mix religious metaphors!). There is also a Hindu mandate to help needy people, but that (she said) translates more into “protecting them from outside forces” rather than introducing extensive interventions. So it looks like a long road to hoe if the goal is to mainstream children with disabilities. There is a need to change the attitudes; not only to introduce new methods and technologies.