Creating Opportunities for Partially-Sighted People with Networking Academy Courses for the Blind

May 1, 2008

By Mike Stone

The Cisco® Networking Academy® is helping disabled people around the world to reach for new job opportunities through a range of specialist projects.

In Hungary, for example, where only seven percent of blind people currently have any sort of employment, a new pilot program has pioneered the teaching of the visually impaired.

The Budapest-based HTTP Foundation launched a program of CCNA® courses for the blind in September 2007. It currently covers a group of eight students at a time, teaching them to design, build, configure and maintain networks of up to 100 computers.

Gabriella Béni, Networking Academy manager and president of the HTTP Foundation, says it all started out as a conversation over coffee in Amsterdam: "I was there on a course and I had previously been thinking about a scheme that could benefit the visually impaired.

"So when I heard that Marian Selea, a customer support manager at the Cisco Amsterdam office was blind, I jumped at the chance to discuss the possibilities."

Marian himself had gained a CCIE® award, Cisco's highest level of professional certification, so had no problems buying into Gabriella's idea of adapting Academy curricula for other blind people.

Armed with some good advice and enthused by the experiences of a highly successful sightless IT professional, Gabriella returned to Hungary in order to put theory into practice.

Her first task was to test a standard curriculum with some blind IT professionals, using JAWS (Job Access With Speech) screen reader software to convert written content into spoken words.

"We decided to play it safe and taught the entry-level course to two non-sighted individuals who already worked in the industry, with another, sighted person to act as a safety net. That way we could realistically evaluate the teaching techniques," she explains.

The course was taught in the Networking Academy at the Budapest Polytechnic Institute (BMF) and was a great success, with one of the blind participants scoring 100 percent.

But the pilot project also uncovered a potential problem: much Academy course content is visual, consisting of Flash animations which JAWS cannot translate.

The solution was to get a sighted person to write a document describing the visual content that could in turn be 'spoken' by the software package.

Next Béni and Péter Szatmári, who are both project coordinators at the HTTP Foundation, sought partners for a full pilot scheme of eight blind learners. The BMF supplied the lab facilities whilst the HTTP Foundation provided financing.

At the time of writing, there are seven blind students being trained this year, with six of them having completed final exams. The semester ended in October 2007 and supplementary material for the CCNA 1 curriculum, suitable for the visually impaired, has also been prepared.

As part of Cisco's wider efforts to bridge the digital divide, this is a project that is still in its infancy. The team is highly ambitious, however, and aims to roll out the scheme across Hungary, once it has achieved the required backing to make it fully self-sufficient.

"So far we have had a budget of EUR€10,000. Think what we could achieve with more," says Béni. Another ambition is to establish stronger links with other Cisco projects dedicated to the sight-impaired.

One of these is the Habilitar project, which has been assisting the blind for the last four years in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The longevity of the scheme has allowed it to overcome some of the challenges of adapting the Networking Academy curriculum for partially-sighted students.

As an example, for cable-making in practical classes it provides cables of different thicknesses to blind students, instead of traditional color-coded cabling.

The Habilitar project is based at the Núcleo de Computação Electrônica (NCE) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Victor Uchoa Moraes, 25, has been blind since the age of 14 and joined Habilitar in 2002. "It has been a very fruitful experience," he comments. "The teachers at the NCE and all the Cisco staff have given me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

A study of Habilitar by the NCE notes that in Brazil's 2000 census approximately 24.5 million people, or 14.5 percent of the population, had some kind of impairment, with visual impairments affecting 9.8 percent.

The social ascension of most differently-abled people in Brazil is limited by low incomes, which restricts access to education, and the situation is compounded by inadequate public policies concerning social development, conclude the authors of the report.

Habilitar is also open to other physically handicapped students, such as Ricardo Souza, a 25-year-old who has been a quadriplegic since an accident in 1997. He is now in the final stages of completing the forth and final part his CCNA course.

"The program is very good," he says. "It allows you a new perspective on education."

Mike Stone is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.