IIM-Calcutta setting special centre for disabled students

The Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta (IIM-C) will set up a special centre aimed at providing adequate support to disabled students from the perspective of academics, the institute said Saturday.

Slated to be jointly managed by the IIM and Webel - a non-profit government organisation - the centre will initially serve visually-challenged students and subsequently cover students facing other challenges too.

"The institute's library is equipped with software to convert any book/material to audio format so as to be convenient for the concerned students. With the new centre, these features will be better enhanced," the institute said in a press statement.

The centre will be using Job Access with Speech (JAWS), a software used for book to voice conversion.

"This will ensure minimum errors during conversion and enable more efficient conversion of graphs. Further regular quality checks on the end products of this process will be done by this centre," said the institute.

While visually-impaired students are already provided scribe support during examinations, the institute has proposed to introduce a pilot programme of dedicating a scribe to be present in the class for first year students for taking down class notes and converting them into PDFs.

The centre is expected to be set up shortly.