Overview of the Cisco Academy
for the Vision Impaired project
The
Department Training and Employment, in their Building Diversity Project 2000
show that vision impaired students have less opportunity to gain
qualifications at vocational and tertiary levels due to the inaccessibility of
learning materials and the inexperience of educational institutions in handling
this type of disability. In order to help address this problem the first Cisco Academy for the Vision Impaired (CAVI) in the world
has been established at Curtin
University by Mr Iain
Murray and Dr Helen Armstrong. With Vision Australia reporting a 63%
unemployment rate for the vision impaired labour force in 2007 CAVI provides IT
education and employment opportunities for people who are totally or partially
blind. Working in collaboration with the Association for the Blind (WA) and
Cisco Systems Inc. since 2004, and the Department of Employment and Workplace
Relations in 2007, Iain and Helen have developed the academy which offers the
vision impaired education and industry standard certification in preparation
for either IT support positions in industry or further tertiary education.
IT
help desk, network administration and call centre positions are ideal
occupations for people who have a vision disability. Basket weaving is
certainly an occupation of the past for those who wish to have a more
meaningful occupation! Although the students have little functional vision,
they use assistive technologies in the form of screen readers (software that
reads the text on a computer screen in audio form), and screen text enlargers,
to ensure they have an equal opportunity to demonstrate their abilities.
The
majority of e-learning materials currently available are presented in web-based
formats that are inaccessible by the assistive technologies used by the vision
impaired. Cisco Systems Inc. is the world’s largest manufacturer of computer
network equipment, and offer extensive online training and certification in IT
and network administration. Only 20% of the online Cisco e-learning materials
are accessible to this disability group. The CAVI project entails conversion of
existing inaccessible Cisco e-learning materials by sighted instructors and
presentation of the converted courses by vision impaired instructors.
Helen
and Iain manage two totally blind instructors and a sighted teaching support
officer. They also supervise 22 vision
impaired students situated both locally, nationally and internationally who join
a virtual classroom to listen to live lectures and take part in laboratory
exercises using a virtual network environment specifically designed for this
purpose. Local students are guided through additional practical laboratory
exercises.
The program is designed to be presented
over a twelve month period and provides the vision impaired participants with
skills to install, configure, and operate computer networks, and build a
computer and install different versions of industry standard operating systems.
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