ATRIEV’s National Trainer’s Training

From October 15 to 26, ATRIEV, our organization, held its quarterly
national trainer’s training program at the National Computer Center located within the University of the Philippines.
There were seventeen representatives sent by various elementary schools, high schools, and government and nongovernment organizations
from several regions in the Philippines. The said group of trainees
consisted of special education teachers, parents of visually impaired
children, volunteers, and executive directors.
The goal of this trainer’s training was to equip the said teachers,
parents, volunteers, and executives with fundamental knowledge
regarding the proper ways of teaching to blind and visually impaired
youths: the concept of the windows environment and popular applications
such as ms word. I, along with two other trainers of ATRIEV conducted
this two-week training.
The main difference of this training from previous ATRIEV trainings is
that instead of using JAWS, NVDA was used in teaching the participants about the concept of windows and ms word. The trainees, majority of whom were sighted, were asked to pay close attention to the voice output provided by the NVDA screen reader and minimize the use of the monitor screen in order for them to be able to have the perspective of blind students.
The first week consisted of topics about windows in general: the
desktop and its icons, my computer, files and folders, and file
management (cutting, copying, pasting, deleting, renaming). The second
week consisted of lessons regarding the commonly used functionalities
of ms word: reading text in ms word using NVDA, selecting text,
adjusting font styles, finding and replacing text, and the spell
checker and thesaurus. Although we saw that NVDA functioned well with
most of the work areas and dialog boxes, we saw later on, that being
in its early versions, NVDA had certain limitations in terms of
providing sufficient information to the user.
At the last day of the training, the trainees were asked to draft an
action plan wherein they indicated how they would apply the knowledge
and methodoligies they have learned in the course when they return to
their respective schools and institutions. Finally, through this
national trainer’s training, ATRIEV hopes that more and more blind and
visually impaired individuals would have access to
information-communication technology, thus bridging the digital divide
in our country.

Tags: assistive technology, ATRIEV, NVDA, Philippines, training, visually impaired