Two Women, One Vision And One "Intelligent" Inclusive Education For Children With Visual Disabilities!

In 2017, the National Program for the Control of Blindness (NPCB) stated that in India alone there were 12 million blind people out of a global total of 39 million, which means that the country is home to a third of the blind population in the country. world.

Despite the numbers, access to education is not as solid as it should be, and this IIT Bombay duo embarked on a journey to make it a reality.

"For many people with visual impairments, understanding concepts based on images such as the water cycle or even the relative distance between two cities or states becomes very difficult. Even if they have access to alternative methods of education such as tactile graphics, they continue to depend on another person to help them overcome them. We wanted to eliminate this dependency and close the access gap, "says Chandni Rajendran to The Better India.

Chandni is the co-founder of "Tactopus", a company that creates innovative educational material based on applications, assisted by an interactive audio companion, for children with disabilities.

Together with his groupmate and friend, Saloni Mehta, Chandni started Tactopus in April 2018. The couple has already impacted hundreds of lives through various schools and independent organizations.

Designers of IIT Bombay, the two discovered their vocation as graduate students. "We both wanted to work in the area of social development and design, and the opportunity came when I got to do an internship at Xavier's Resource Center for People with Visual Impairments." It was this experience that opened me to reality and pushed me to Think beyond existing technology, "says Chandni.

Check out the range of Tactopus inclusive books and cards in The Better India Shop

She adds: "As sighted people, we often take a lot of information for granted, for example, all visual or visually activated information such as color, distance, diagrams." So, we were surprised to realize that even well-educated adults with visual disabilities they would not have a clear idea of the maps, although this can be corrected with tactile graphics, we wanted to go one step higher than that ".

Incumbent in Social Alpha, an initiative of Tata Trusts, the company based in Bengaluru creates interactive tactile graphics and tangible learning solutions through a variety of books and cards, which emphasize concepts such as geography, numbers and rhymes.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.thebetterindia.com/178695/bengaluru-tactile-books-graphics-education-disability-india/