Blind people and the problems they face in Georgia
By Esma Gumberidze
Monday, April 14
(continued from previous Monday issue)
My life as a blind university student
I'm a freshman in the law school at Free University of Tbilisi. It takes between 30-60 minutes to get from my house to Free University. I never go anywhere around the city all by myself, because of the poor infrastructure throughout the capital.
Let me describe my journey from home to the university. It is about a 10 minutes' walk from my house to the subway station. On the way, the sidewalks are filled with parked cars, so my mother and I often have to walk right on the motorway, side-by-side with speeding cars. In Didube, where we get out of the subway and catch a bus, there is a never-ending stream of people, rushing in and out of the subway station, running and pushing each other aside.
There's no special pathway for the blind to navigate. Forced to join the rush, nobody notices me walking alone or using a cane, so I might even get pushed onto the railroad tracks in others’ haste. There's no real bus station, so bus number 38 that takes me to university, stop wherever possible.
Once at the university, the classroom doors open outside the room in the hallway, so I have to walk in the middle of hallway in order to avoid bumping into the open door, instead of walking by the hallway, as I was instructed while being a FLEX exchange student in the US.
Oftentimes students don't notice me walking, and don't step aside on time, so they bump into either on my cane or to me. However, little-by-little they get used to seeing me in the university hallways. I know the location of the university exam center, where I take exams and some other rooms that I use more often. If I don't know where I need to go, I ask security guards and they take me.
When I get out of lectures and seminars, I meet my reader, the student, who is hired and paid by the university to read the materials to me assigned by my lecturers and to read for me during the exams, where books are allowed. I take my exams using the computer. I listen to the questions installed in my laptop and type the answers. To take an exam I'm given more time, than the other students. During the first days of my university studies, the administration and I decided that they would ask a fellow law school freshman to volunteer to read the assigned materials with me (they have to read them anyway). But it didn't work out, because students weren't reading everything, they were supposed to read, because, as I explained above in the introduction, people who can see, unlike blind people, can quickly and easily look for the necessary information and find it in the books during the seminar. Some were saying to me: "Nobody reads this anyway. It’s not necessary. It's impossible to understand this text anyway, so why bother?"
While reading to me they were socializing with other students, texting their friends, and chatting on Facebook, so we could never cover all the assigned material. After the first month of my studies was over, I talked to the law school dean, explained the situation and asked to hire someone to read for me. Thankfully, so they did.
The accessibility to books is huge issue for blind students. While blind kids study in the school for the blind, they have some text-books in Braille, some that are audio recorded in MP3 format and some books their parents or school aids still have to read. Luckily there's not that much to read in school. The accessibility to leisure books is less of a problem, there are enough of them in Braille and recorded in MP3 format on disks. In addition, blind people who are internet literate and know English, Russian or other languages, are able to find and download a wide variety of books online. There's also the Russian software/library, called Maxreader that you can download and install on your computer and without much searching, you can access tens of thousands of e-books in the Russian language.
The creators of this software used a technique that converts Russian lingual scanned books to electronic audible books. You go to the electronic library's catalog, type a book title or author’s name, and this program finds this book for you. Inside the book you can search for the page you want – or the word or chapter you want. You can have the program spell the word if you wish. You can also adjust the reading pitch and speed, fast-forward the text and so on. But the rest of the books in this program are pleasure books or text-books that our universities don't use so often.
There was an attempt to make a program like Maxreadre read Georgian books, but it doesn't have an application that adjusts reading speed, and it reads very slowly. This software (Bu) doesn't read whole words, but divides words into syllables and reads them syllable by syllable.
University students have to read a lot and some texts require a lot of attention and in-depth thinking. So we need a reader that is adjustable to high speeds of reading and at the same time, one that pronounces everything clearly, so Bu isn't convenient.
At university, where sometimes we have to read 50+ pages a day, blind students face huge difficulties. This is because there are not enough electronic audible text-books. Of course, I'm really lucky that Free University hired a reader for me, but I have to stay after lectures/seminars every day, accommodate my aid's schedule (she is a student too). While if I had electronic books, I would be able to listen to my assignments at home, on the week-ends, at night, or at any time and place convenient to me.
Considering the current limited access to electronic audio materials, in order to write a research paper, or earn my master’s degree, I will have to constantly have someone who can be with me, not only for reading books to me, but also to dictate page numbers, dates of publishing, the editor, commas, quotation marks, whenever I have to include accurate information about my sources or quote my source in my paper.
Free University of Tbilisi has a lot of scanned electronic text-books, but there's no software, that converts Georgian scanned books to audio. So the only material I can listen to by computer is the one written in Sylfaen Microsoft Word, but there's so little material written in this format!
In order to make more of the materials accessible for me, the university would have to figure out the exact book titles and page numbers that lecturers were going to assign throughout the semester and hire one or even more people, to type in Sylfaen Word all the reading assignments that I would receive throughout the following semester. This would have to be decided before I even began the course.
Tbilisi State University has recently received a Braille printer, but the university will have to buy a lot of thick paper that can maintain raised braille dots perceptible for a longer time, and hire a couple of people to constantly print the materials on Braille.
College text-books recorded in MP3 format and by a person reading (not electronic voice, but a real human's reading) has a big disadvantage - you can't spell or look-up words, commas, periods, colons, semicolons, quotations etc, which becomes necessary, for instance, while writing a dissertation and when it's necessary to quote something.
In human recorded books it's often impossible to search within the book for a certain page, chapter, or word. This limited access to audio college text-books that makes the studying process for blind students even harder, indirectly violates one of our human rights, which is declared in the constitution of Georgia, according to which, every individual should be able to develop themselves independently, without discrimination.
A solution to this issue would be the creation of a college-level Georgian lingual text-book electronic audio software/library, that could, similar to Maxreader, be installed on a computer and be used without going on-line. At first, this library/software should be filled primarily with college text-books published in Georgian that blind college students are currently using and should be available and easily usable for any university blind student for free. At least, one person has to be hired, who will constantly scan (if necessary) and convert the scanned Georgian lingual text-books to audio format and add them to the library, as new orders from university students come.
The converter should also help blind students with installing, changing, and updating the software/library. Students also should be able to e-mail or send to each other these converted audio text-books or install them in each other's computers. In the future, these Georgian audio books' software/library might be filled with pleasure books as well. This project requires intensive consultations with possible users, a responsible and really professional computer engineer/programmer (or computer engineers/programmers) and, of course, financial resources.
(to be continued)