People with disabilities need access to technology
TECHNOLOGY has done so much to allow people with disabilities to overcome any handicap that might arise from those disabilities and almost every year brings in more developments that make life ever easier.
But the problem for many, especially in a developing country like Zimbabwe, and especially for poorer families and many rural families, is accessing that technology.
The Forum for African Women Educationalists Zimbabwe Chapter were quite right this week when marking the International Day of the Girl Child to stress the needs of those who can be left behind. So much has been done, and is being done, to change cultural and society attitudes to girls, along with the necessary legal changes, that the stress now has to move to those who are not winning.
And, unfortunately, these include girls with disabilities and the educationalists were especially concerned about converting their real and legal rights to education into practical measures that worked.
One area was obviously e-learning. For those living with some disabilities this makes a great deal of sense.
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education has been developing this area at some speed and there are many other groups around the world making sure that e-learning is possible for everyone.
However those relying on e-learning need the appliances and the data connections. These are easy if you have to learn at home in a major urban area and your parents are wealthy. It can be more difficult in a town like Chitungwiza, where the educationalists marked the day, but at least relatively inexpensive cable broadband and mains power is on tap.
As you move across Zimbabwe there must be families where it becomes practically impossible. Even if a donor gives the computer or laptop, and when you are learning at home something better than a phone is needed, there is still the high cost of the data connection using a wireless network and the problem of reliable electricity connections.
The educationalists were not just looking at girls with disabilities working from home. They wanted them to go to school.
Many disabilities, with modest technology, do not trap anyone at home. Wheelchairs, for example, make many mobile but again you need the chair, and one that remains light but which can be moved without falling to bits during heavy use on some of the roads people still have to use.
Schools have been adapting buildings to allow pupils in wheelchairs to go to school. This includes ramps, at least one bathroom with doors wide enough to take a chair and the required extra bars and the like. In some cases in a multi-storey school, it might require annual moves of some teachers to a different classroom so that the classes with pupils in wheelchairs or other mobility disabilities are on the ground floor.
There are other modest technology fixes that will help many, from proper spectacles and decent hearing aids onwards. But even these need the children living with disabilities to have practical access.
And as you move up the scale of disabilities the technology, and the public access fixes required, grow. These days computers with the right addons and software and the more complex self-propelled wheelchairs can allow so many to overcome the disabilities they live with and function fully in society.
But again even those with this technology need town planners and architects to think very seriously about their needs so they can move around with all their equipment.
A billionaire’s child with all the technology plus chauffeured car and some sort of nurse aide can live an exceptionally full life since they have full access to what is needed to manage and minimise the effects of the disabilities that would otherwise condemn them to sitting in a room all day.
But that level of access to technology, and that level of access to all the things that make mobility possible, are needed for everyone. Are we, for example, insisting that the new Zupco buses we are buying can cope with even a person in a simple wheelchair, or someone who might have difficulty ascending those steep stairs that some bus designers insist on. These are small things for the physically fit, but can make a huge difference to those who need mobility devices.
The general cultural changes, that those living with a disability are those who need technology to live a full life rather than having to sit out their lives as “the disabled”, are very positive. No one needs to be left behind. But some need appliances and gadgets to keep up with the rest of us.
A lot of the efforts now need to be, as the women educationalists noted this week, ensuring that those living with disabilities have practical access to the services and technologies that are already available and which are getting better and more wide-ranging every year.