Today, I approach the issues of disability and accessibility in the case of education in developing countries from the perspective of someone who grew up in Morocco with a visual impairment. While I led a privileged lifestyle, which allowed me to attend a private school, the concept of accessibility and accommodation remained rather foreign to me for most of my schooling. The differences between various disabilities aren\u2019t as nuanced as they are in the North American context. <\/p>\n
The relative concepts of accessibility and accommodation<\/b><\/p>\n
In Morocco, you were either blind or deaf, but not visually impaired or hard of hearing (except if you\u2019re older and in that case, you either turn up the volume of the TV or radio and have people speak louder). From my experience, there were no in-between categories. <\/p>\n
I was fortunate enough to attend an American international school, where the classes were small enough to get individual attention and the teacher\u2019s approach more adaptable to its students needs. If I had gone through the French or Moroccan system, I would have drowned in the myriad of students and been forgotten by unconcerned teachers. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s not to say that the public system is void of caring teachers or successful students, but rather that the challenges that students with disabilities face in such impersonal settings make the student\u2019s job more difficult. <\/p>\n
I never thought of myself as disabled because I wasn\u2019t raised to think of it that way. The words, \u201cdisability\u201d, \u201caccessibility\u201d and \u201caccommodation\u201d didn\u2019t really become a part of my vocabulary until I moved to North America. When I was diagnosed, my father, who was an ophthalmologist, asked one of his French colleagues what to do. The colleague told him to mainstream me. And that\u2019s what they did. I was raised to think of all I could do, not what I couldn\u2019t do. <\/p>\n
So when I found out, at 17 that I couldn\u2019t drive, as naive as it may sound, I was devastated. Until then, my visual limitations were my own to work around. This was different. While I probably knew on some level that it would never happen, I\u2019d grown up looking forward to driving. Until that moment, no one had ever had that discussion with me because it wasn\u2019t part of the language. <\/p>\n
Accommodation and the stigma that goes with it<\/b><\/p>\n
After moving to Canada for school, I discovered the wonders of accommodation and the stigma that goes with it. While you may think that accommodations would be a godsend, an opportunity to jump on, it took me a couple of years to feel comfortable asking for what I needed and not thinking, well, I don\u2019t really need this or that, I can manage. Adapting to accommodations isn\u2019t always as straightforward as you would think, especially if you\u2019re not used to them. <\/p>\n
My father once told me the story of a mother who came with her child for a consult. When he told her that her child had albinism, the mother became upset and never came back. The mother eventually came to her senses and did what was right for her child\u2019s education, but the point is that cultural aspect of enabling kids and adults with disabilities to learn isn’t just about the physical access, it’s about the culture too. <\/p>\n
When most think of disability, they think of it in terms of extremes. To be disabled is to be in a wheelchair or being unable to see light. They don\u2019t think of the spectrum on which your impairment can reside. While the nuances of ability are better delineated in North America, they don\u2019t always seem to be applied in technology. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s great to have accessible technology designed for learning, but if the accessibility options aren\u2019t integrated on basic products, than who will use them? Never mind that much of the technology is unaffordable (even in Western terms), the cultural barriers won\u2019t help the implementation. A magnifying glass is one thing, but when you get into electronic technology, I think that they need to have multiple uses. A CCTV can be very helpful, but who has that kind of money<\/a> and who wants to be seen using one? <\/p>\n