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Posts Tagged ‘Joyojeet Pal’

A Screen Reader in Sierra Leone

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

flag of Sierra LeoneI entered an electrical store in central Freetown in Sierra Leone with a colleague who wanted to buy an appliance. I had tagged along just for company, but almost immediately the store assistants started addressing me, instead of my colleague who had a visible disability. He had a doctorate from the UK, and served on a number of state councils, but was almost instantly dismissed from being a prospective customer. “Anyone disabled is automatically assumed as being there for handouts,” he said.

Current state of disabilities in Sierra Leone

International attention to disability in Sierra Leone has frequently focused on the civil war and the use of blinding and amputations as a weapon of war. Extreme poverty and a lack of healthcare has meant that Sierra Leone has a high incidence of preventable or curable blindness and disabilities related to diseases such as polio, for which there was no nationwide eradication plan till as recently as 1998. The interruption of medical facilities during the war recently has meant that Sierra Leone is among the countries with the highest number of young people disabled by polio. Continue reading A Screen Reader in Sierra Leone

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Disability in the Media: Issues for an Equitable Workplace

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

movie theater

As a number of nations prepare for legislation and public action on disability rights in the wake of the UN Convention, a range of issues that impact popular perceptions of disability in the workplace need examination. The discussion of disability on film is not new. There are several books written on various aspects of the subject, and disability studies programs offer classes that run entire semesters on media issues. Though much progress has been made on subjects such as the relationship of screen depictions with the dominant models of thinking about disability in the western world, comparatively less has been written about the portrayal of disability in cinema in the rest of the world.

The canonical western cinema has followed a few dominant patterns regarding the portrayal of people with disabilities. Characters could typically be pitiable (Coming Home), burdensome (Whose life is it anyway?), sinister (Dr. Strangelove), or unable to live a successful integrated life (Gattaca). The fundamental underlying theme has been the disabled character’s maladjustment or incompatibility in the public sphere, effectively highlighting what we can be referred to as an “otherness” from the non-disabled population.

Continue reading Disability in the Media: Issues for an Equitable Workplace

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Part II: Assistive Technology and Accessibility Research in the Developing World

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Establishing AT research in the developing world is not going to be trivial, especially given the overall lack of existing scientific research capacity. Building this capacity must be based on a significant long-term investment and a commitment from the state and higher educational institutions to reward research both academically and commercially.

AT and Accessibility represent a massive breadth of work – building expertise in speech synthesizers for new languages requires a very different skill-set from building automated wheelchairs of currency readers. The most successful AT research centers have typically had connections with university, and thereby tapped into faculty with a range of interests. These have also bridged the connection between academia and industry, but from a funding perspective have almost always been kickstarted by the state. State commitments of inclusion to their vision-impaired populations cannot be realized without an investment in building an indigenous and inclusive research culture.

In an ideal case scenario, this would mean building a scenario where people can think of research as a career – from graduate studies onward either towards academic careers or industrial research positions. Given that the larger goals of building scientific research can be anything between very challenging to completely infeasible for a number of smaller countries, for the purposes of AT research there are three short-term possibilities.

Continue reading Part II: Assistive Technology and Accessibility Research in the Developing World

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Part I: Assistive Technology and Accessibility Research in the Developing World

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

The spread of research and scientific capacity in the developing world has been an area of intense discussion for several years within the public health community. The simple statistic that approximately 10% of global research monies are devoted to diseases that impact 90% of the world’s population is explained by the fact that such disease burden is primarily borne in the developing world. Likewise, much new Assistive Technology (AT) research funding goes towards technologies designed for use by people in the regions where they are researched – the industrialized world.

Assistive Technologies are arguably indispensable for the social inclusion of people with disabilities for independent, expedient daily interaction in the public domain anywhere in the world, irrespective of the level of economic development and infrastructure. For most persons with vision impairments, the use of AT can be vital for participation in a work force that is increasingly digital in nature. However, technology in this space remains prohibitively expensive.
Continue reading Part I: Assistive Technology and Accessibility Research in the Developing World

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