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📰 Visually impaired struggle with NCERT e-textbooks
Over 60% of NCERT chapters and over 95% of SCERT books are either totally or partially inaccessible.
•For Class VII student Tejasvi Raj, doing his daily homework comes with the double challenge of being a visually impaired student in the COVID-19 era of virtual schooling. His screen reading software can’t access the PowerPoint presentation that his teachers had prepared for online school. E-textbooks provided on the government’s virtual platform DIKSHA, which it has promoted as a transformative resource for digital education, are not fully accessible either.
•“The PowerPoints [presentations] for Zoom classes are sent to students in PDF format, so they are not readable for him. The NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) e-textbooks are only partly readable. Any time they have images or diagrams, it is blank for him. Hindi and Sanskrit books are not readable at all,” said his mother Manorama Yadav, adding that COVID-19 had made everything more difficult for the student of Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram. “Teachers are already coping with so many changes in online school. Even for his assignments and exam papers, I have to keep reminding them to send it in Word format. I worry that if classes don’t restart, he will keep falling behind,” she added.
•According to a recent study by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, more than half of the NCERT textbooks available on the government’s virtual education platform DIKSHA are not accessible for visually impaired students. In fact, the DIKSHA platform itself is difficult to navigate for visually impaired students, said the report.
•“Take for example, the drop down menu for language selection. Rather than clearly stating different language options available, the screen reader announces ‘clickable, clickable, clickable’. This is due to different scripts used for the different languages, which are not readable by a screen reading software,” said the report, adding that the filter for selecting the correct class, and the links for downloading materials were also not accessible.
•Analysis of 65 chapters from e-textbooks published by NCERT and the Tamil Nadu and Telangana State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) also found that many pages are published in formats which are not navigable for the screen reader, while visual elements such as images, graphs and watermarks also impede comprehension. More than 60% of the NCERT chapters were either totally or partially inaccessible, the report said, while it was over 95% for the SCERT books. More than half of the 907 learning activities in the NCERT texts were also inaccessible for a visually impaired student, with the worst being 80% for Mathematics.
•For Sanya Gandhi, an 18-year student of Political Science at Delhi’s Hindu College, the challenges are familiar. “I’m a person with a lot of logical and reasoning ability, and I would have liked to do Mathematics. But I could not access so much of my Maths textbooks in school, especially geometry or trigonometry. So I had to compromise on my ambitions,” she said, pointing out that in the U.S. and the U.K., formats and software which can make diagrams and symbols accessible to visually impaired students are in wider use. “In India, in recent years, we have placed a lot of focus on physical infrastructure that aids accessibility for students with disabilities. But we still have a digital divide,” she added.
•Anirban Mukherjee, a visually impaired English teacher in a small town 40 km away from Kolkata, adds that the difficulties are worse for students in vernacular languages. The West Bengal Board of Secondary Education texts are not accessible on the DIKSHA platform, and most books are uploaded in scanned PDF formats that are impossible for a screen reader to access, he says, adding that at least English texts are available in Braille. Even as a teacher, he finds it impossible to correct assignments which his students send in picture formats.
•“At least the better mainstream schools moved to online schooling. But many less privileged visually impaired students study in special schools with hostels which shut down due to COVID-19. Few of them have smartphones. So their education has been completely derailed,” he said.
•Recording someone reading out textbooks, reformatting e-textbooks, and providing direct teacher contact are urgent steps that need to be initiated. “Very minor tweaks are required. But accessibility is simply not a priority,” he added.
📰 Wrong shots: On West Bengal poll violence
ECI must take measures to prevent violence, and keep the election process fair
•Five people were killed on Saturday during the fourth phase of polls in West Bengal, where the first three phases were largely eventless. While one person was allegedly killed by political rivals, four others were killed when security personnel fired more than 15 rounds in a span of two hours at Cooch Behar’s Sitalkuchi Assembly constituency. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has concluded that the police action was necessary, and taken in “self defence,” but the political storm kicked up by the episode continues to rage. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has alleged a conspiracy by the BJP to scare her supporters and called for the resignation of Home Minister Amit Shah. Mr. Shah, in turn, has said the Chief Minister’s call to gherao personnel of the Central security forces led to the flare-up. The Trinamool Congress has alleged that Central forces are restricting it and helping the BJP in the campaign. It is unclear whether the force used to control the mob was proportionate and the deaths were avoidable. Elsewhere in the State, a group of people tried to stop the vehicle of a BJP MP. All these are bad omens, against the backdrop of an intensely competitive political battle between Ms. Banerjee’s Trinamool and the BJP.
•The ECI’s role in Bengal has been called into question by Opposition parties for various reasons. Its explanation for spreading the polls over eight phases over a month has not mitigated the concern that it gave undue advantage to the BJP. Its practice of redeploying civil and police officials is a time-tested measure to keep the election process fair. However, if redeployment leads to administrative chaos and partisanship, it is a matter of concern. While the ECI has been proactive in acting on charges of religious appeals made by Trinamool leaders including Ms. Banerjee, such alacrity has been missing in its dealings with the BJP. BJP leaders have made brazen communal appeals and gone scot-free. ECI advertisements that invoked the sacrifices of security personnel amounted to the Commission overstepping its strictly apolitical role. The personal role of the Prime Minister in a State election has made the task of the ECI much more difficult, and it has not risen up to the challenge. Ms. Banerjee may have gone over the top in trolling the ECI to “rename MCC as Modi Code of Conduct”. But it is not the first time that a Chief Minister has questioned the ECI’s impartiality. Narendra Modi himself had questioned the fairness of the ECI when he was Gujarat Chief Minister. Its reputation built over decades kept public trust intact, through all this. That trust is now being eroded, through acts of commission and omission. There are four more phases of polling in Bengal and the ECI must take measures to prevent violence, and keep the process fair and enabling for voters.
