Ministry keen to offer special services to visually-impaired students

The Ministry of Education and Higher Education affirmed its great care for students with visual disabilities, by offering and providing services for them according to the situation of each student.The ministry said that the evaluation of this category begins at "Rou'a Assessment Advice and Support Centre, to determine the level of its actual performance and determine the necessary services for its individual needs, and then integrate the visually-impaired students with their peers from ordinary students in the regular classes, while providing arrangements and facilities at the level of the classroom environment at the teaching level. This is to achieve equal learning opportunities for them, such as using their enlargement devices, and printing curricula in a larger size.The Acting Director of the Special Education and Gifted Care Department at the ministry, Fatima Al-Saadi, said in a statement to Qatar News Agency (QNA) on the occasion of World Braille Day, that blind and severely visually-impaired students are being integrated into four government schools specialised in integrating visual impairment, two of which are schools in the preparatory stage, and the same in the secondary stage for boys and girls, so that students are trained and taught to read and write in the Braille method, and training in mobility, recognition and guidance using the white cane, in partnership with the Al-Noor Institute for the Blind, with the start of preparing specialised laboratories in schools for the integration of the blind that have been equipped with the latest equipment, which supports and facilitates the education of blind students.Al-Saadi said that the Ministry of Education co-operates with local and international centres specialised in assistive technology, such as Qatar Assistive Technology Centre (Mada), which provides many technological means for blind students, such as (obtecon), which is an electronic device that converts written material into words and letters, as well as (magnifier) which is a magnifying glass to help the visually impaired read, in addition to many programmes and applications for blind students, through teachers in all disciplines who are fluent in the Braille language, and to the support and family education services provided by these schools to parents of students with visual disabilities, through partnership and cooperation with social institutions such as the Qatar Social and Cultural Centre for Blind.She noted that these students obtain, after graduating from high school, a certificate that qualifies them to enroll in university education inside and outside the country, and the Ministry of Education co-operates with the integration centre at Qatar University in providing all facilities for blind students, adding that many blind students have obtained bachelor's degrees in different fields, many of them have enrolled in different fields of work.The World Braille Day falls on Jan 4 every year, and this language was named after its inventor in the 19th century, the French Louis Braille, and it represents a display of alphabet and numeric symbols using six points that can be touched to embody each letter and number. (QNA)