ANGEL Pocket Reader provided to visually-challenged students of UoH
The University of Hyderabad (UoH) has always been in the forefront of providing facilities to its visually- challenged students on campus. Recently the University has provided Angel Pocket Reader to all the visually-challenged students, enrolled in the various courses. The device was handed over to the students by Prof. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, Vice-Chancellor and Prof. B RajaShekhar,Registrar.
This Angel PRO is a Talking Digital Pocket Daisy Player, E-book Reader, Music Player, Radio-cum-Voice Recorder-All in One, Fully talking and is specially designed for the Visually Challenged Persons. The device can be used for recording classroom lectures, to listen to the scanned academic data, data downloaded from the internet, and the best part is that Angel will also read the PDF documents. The most important aspect about the Angel is that it will read the e-books, which is very useful – as students can browse the e-books from internet and same can be listened to at their convenience.
Mr. Rajender, Ph.D. (Telugu) Scholar says that the Angel Pocket Reader is not only very useful but also alerts him with musical buttons whether the data is getting recorded or not, and comparing to other recording instruments, data in the Angel will not be lost as they will prompt couple of times, if any wrong button is pressed. Ms. Swathi, IMA Social Sciences, informed that University of Hyderabad is the first University in India to give such costly Angel Pocket Readers to its visually-challenged students. She further adds that this Angel is of high memory which will enable more data to be stored. Another advantage is that Angel reads all formats of documents, viz. converted audio books, e-books, because of this facility, I am very happy and very interestingly listening all the books referred by subject teachers and I am also grateful to University authorities for providing such an excellent equipment to Visually Challenged students. Ms. Madhulika, IMA Social Sciences expressed that the Angel Readers provided to them are very useful and serve many purposes pertaining to academic use and Angel reads the text files and typed documents which is very essential for her to listen to typed matter again and again which will benefit the students in getting good marks in the internal test and end-semester exams.
For the last five years, UoH has been continuously extending every possible support for the visually-challenged students in their academic activity. Some of the electronic items with required software that have been provided to the students for their academic pursuits include Tape Records, Audio Cassettes, MP3 Players, Desktops, Braille Printers, Laserjet Printers, Zoomx Scanner, Canon Scanners, JAWS Software, Kruzeil Software, Slates, Talking Calculator, etc. Some recreation and musical items like the Dolak, Kanjeera, Yamaha Musical Key Board, complete Cricket kit such as sound ball, bat, wickets have also been provided.
Dr. S Rajagopal, is presently the Chairman for the Empowered Committee for Differently-abled persons at UoH.