AIOU to establish accessibility centres for visually impaired students

Islamabad: Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) will be starting e-learning ‘Accessibility Centres’ for visually impaired aspirants at 44 regional offices of the university within a month.

Vice Chancellor of AIOU, Prof Dr Shahid Siddiqui said “After the successful major project in the main campus of the university, we will be establishing accessibility centres at our regional offices as early as possible.”

As per the press release, the first of the accessibility centres was inaugurated in Multan, which will provide to students from South Punjab. When inaugurating the first accessibility centre in a local office, Dr Siddiqui said the centres will attend to the requirements of marginalized segments of society. The vice chancellor of the varsity is already offering visually impaired students along with free education, scholarships, books as well as other learning materials.

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All accessibility centres will be armed along with the computers, scanners, printers and software through which visually impaired aspirants can access content on the internet.

It was also decided to establish a well-equipped library at each office of AIOU. A librarian’s coordination of regional office has also been established at the main campus for coordinating as well as monitoring libraries and accessibility centres crosswise the country.

All of the libraries will be open the entire week and will provide academic support to the students of AIOU and the students from other educational institutes as well.

All the libraries associated along with the central library in Islamabad, which will be armed along more than 4,000 digital research resources.

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The press release quoted the vice chairman of university as saying that special attention will be paid to developing libraries for research purposes as well as bringing the learning standards of university at par along with international standards.

A training session for librarians will also be organized next month.

The Vice Chancellor also said that scanned copied of textbooks will also be made available on the internet for the benefit of 1.3 million students of the country crosswise the country.