Is Delhi blind-friendly?

Sat, May 3 01:30 AM

New York has got its first blind governor but can Delhi follow with a blind chief minister? According to the health ministry's latest figures, the capital has the country's highest number of visually-impaired people (15.5 lakh) after UP. Delhi has indeed become a more navigable place for the visually-impaired in the last decade. But is this infrastructure good enough to facilitate a blind CM to perform as well (or not) as any other? A CM's life involves a lot of reading.

Wouldn't it be a logistic nightmare to transcribe everything into Braille? "Braille is not the only option," says Prashant Ranjan Verma, project manager at the National Association for the Blind, who is visually-disabled himself. Softwares convert printed documents to e-text that can be heard with the help of the screen reading software.

"A totally blind person can handle e-mails," says net-savvy Verma. Indeed, Delhi currently has highly-qualified blind people working as programmers and HR executives in MNCs (a CM needs lesser qualifications).

And the metro, with its blind-friendly technology, is one of the best things to have happened. "But what about electric poles in the middle of footpaths?" complains Verma.

Hmm.

but CMs don't have to walk on footpaths now, do they?.

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