John Adoyi, PBA Journalism MenteeAs the world celebrates World Braille Day today, January 4, it is sad to note that Nigeria is still far behind in having a system that supports education of visually impaired persons and others with various forms of disabilities.
World Braille Day is celebrated every year on January 4 to raise awareness of the importance of Braille as a means of communication for blind and partially sighted people, and helps advocate for their equal rights and opportunities.
Being a student with disability in Nigeria is like cutting down a tree with a machete. The education system is superannuated and difficult that it only takes the grace of God to do at least two years without thinking of giving up at least 725 times.
A lot of tertiary institutions, both public and private lack facilities for persons with disability to cope.
Most of them would tell the student to provide for themself or even say, “We can’t accept you”. This is because they don’t have any idea on how to help the physically challenged student function effectively in their premises.
This has made it difficult for people with one form of disability or the other to study in the nation’s universities.
To that effect, blind people have been limited to Arts and Humanities because the education system lacks technocrats and the necessary equipment that should be deployed to facilitate their study in other faculties or disciplines.
LOUIS BRAILLE (1809–1852), invented braille at the age of fifteen, giving blind people the opportunity to grow and put their talent to use.
Braille has over the years gained popularity all over the world and become the base of a blind person’s education in the western world.
Many years down the line; the internet is now available and there are now digital books in PDF, ePub and so many other document formats. Apart from that, the manual method of brailing with Marburg and stylus has been upgraded with the advent of braille displays and embossers. And now, there is a sigh of relief in the blind community, well, except if you are blind in Nigeria.
There is no university in Nigeria right now that can boast of ace education system. The Academic Staff Union of Universities is always at loggerheads with the federal government, crippling studies for weeks and months.
Theories are taught in universities while, some textbooks we use are somewhat obsolete, or at best can be said to be behind the times.
Everything seems to be difficult for people to cope with, making some quit out of frustration.
If those who are sighted are finding it difficult to survive then how would I that can’t see anything even think of going to school?
A friend once told me “na only person wey get energy feet go school.”
I rebuked that assertion then but now I look at it deeply and I see that what he said could be true.
How will the statement not be true when lecturers don’t even know how to teach visually impaired students, how will that statement not be true when a lecturer will give names of textbooks to buy and you can’t even find one of those textbooks online? When you meet your lecturer for a soft copy he doesn’t even have it and the same lecturers will give you an assignment and they will expect you to do it from that same textbook, calling it a book review.
A lot of these universities don’t even have braille machines in their libraries.
Putting assignments and buying textbooks aside, the issue of writing exams is really frustrating. The day I don’t write a computer-based exam, I would be praying so hard that my lecturer will actually allow me to go print my paper and give it to her. A lecturer once told me that, if I mistakenly stepped out of the hall to print my exam I should “forget about the exam” entirely simply because I did not write with pen, in this digital age. Even the CBT the day I don’t see anybody to read the questions for me i find it difficult to scale through.
There are times when I have no choice but to lose marks simply because I can’t find anything on the assignment that lecturers gave. Not because I can’t do the assignment but simply because the book is not available either in braille or electronic formats.
“Na only person wey get energy fit go school.”
Enough is enough, Nigerian educational system really needs to be revamped not just for those who can see but for those who have disabilities. There needs to be inclusiveness in every ramification of life in universities and other tertiary institutions.
In school libraries, let there be braille displays and embossers for people who need them. Universities have special education departments, work with them to make that happen.
In this digital age, people shouldn’t be reading exams to visually impaired students, there is text to speech software that can do that. Some of them are free to get. Braille machines can be provided for the brailing of exam questions and textbooks, in case the speech software isn’t comfortable.
Make your notes and your textbooks available online either in audio format or text format.
In the US, blind people are software engineers, computer scientists and are involved in other fields of science. The narrative needs to change in Nigeria. Don’t always believe every blind person wants to be a journalist or teacher and so on. It is high time the necessary facilities are put in place.
There should be resource centres in every university. The resource centres are to be a part of the library system. They should work in collaboration with the special education department, the library and the school governing council to make some of these provisions come to reality.
Schooling is not all about yielding admission, it goes deeper than that. It necessitates having an enabling environment for people to gain the best form of education.
John Adoyi is a visually impaired PBA Journalism Mentee
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