Thir­ty-five-year-old Can­dice John is no or­di­nary teacher. For the past three years, she has worked at Na­tion­al Cen­tre for Per­sons with Dis­abil­i­ties (NCPD) in San Fer­nan­do as res­i­dent In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy (IT) In­struc­tor.

John is vi­su­al­ly im­paired, though if you look around her IT lab, it has the ap­pear­ance of any oth­er you would find at in­sti­tu­tions around the na­tion. Have a clos­er look and you would see that this is no or­di­nary lab.

As a per­son with a vi­su­al im­pair­ment, John is aware of the po­ten­tial chal­lenges of her trainees who have a wide range of dis­abil­i­ties: phys­i­cal, autism, deaf, hard of hear­ing, speech im­pair­ment, cere­bral pal­sy, Down’s Syn­drome, blind and vi­su­al­ly im­paired, in­tel­lec­tu­al and learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties, as well as mild men­tal and seizure dis­or­ders.

While as­sis­tive tech­nol­o­gy such as spe­cialised com­put­er equip­ment or soft­ware pro­grams can help com­pen­sate for dis­abil­i­ties and im­pair­ments that af­fect hand dex­ter­i­ty, vi­sion, and hear­ing, the high cost of such tech­nol­o­gy makes per­son­al ac­qui­si­tion pro­hib­i­tive for many in­di­vid­u­als.

Over the past 14 years, In­ter­na­tion­al Game Tech­nol­o­gy (IGT), for­mal­ly known as GTECH, has part­nered with NCPD to do­nate re­quired as­sis­tive hard­ware and soft­ware to keep the IT lab con­tin­u­al­ly up­dat­ed and rel­e­vant.

Dur­ing a re­cent han­dover cer­e­mo­ny, the lab re­ceived an up­grade of com­put­er sys­tems and soft­ware as well as nine desk­top com­put­ers, three head­sets, an all-in-one print­er, an iMac, a touch screen lap­top, soft­ware, and six un­in­ter­rupt­ed pow­er sup­ply (UPS) de­vices. At the event, IGT Coun­try Man­ag­er Roger Bo­lai said: “IGT be­lieves that pro­vid­ing com­mu­ni­ties with the tools for ac­cess­ing knowl­edge and op­por­tu­ni­ties is an im­por­tant el­e­ment of so­ci­etal ad­vance­ment that is es­sen­tial in this age of in­stant-so­cial in­ter­ac­tion.”

In ad­di­tion to spe­cialised hard­ware like mous­es that are con­trolled by foot, joy­stick, or track­ball and large print key­boards de­signed with high-colour-con­trast let­ters, John teach­es trainees at NCPD how to use soft­ware to get their work done. For ex­am­ple, Drag­on Nat­u­rallySpeak­ing con­verts speech to text and JAWS (Job Ac­cess With Speech) is a screen read­er pro­gramme that en­ables a blind or vi­su­al­ly im­paired user to read the text that is dis­played on the com­put­er screen with a speech syn­the­siz­er or braille dis­play.

John com­ment­ed: “I’m proud of the work that we’re do­ing, and tech­nol­o­gy has en­abled us to do so much more, but I re­alise that many peo­ple don’t know much about the lives of the dis­abled com­mu­ni­ty nor the ser­vices that we of­fer at NCPD.

There is a place in Trinidad and To­ba­go that wel­comes and trains all per­sons with dis­abil­i­ties—we don’t dis­crim­i­nate. If you have an ac­quired dis­abil­i­ty, there’s help.”