Five US experts in educating the blind are helping train more than a dozen teachers from a north China school.

 

The week-long training course focuses on how to use computer aided technology to help blind students more quickly acquire knowledge and skills, according to the Tianjin School for the Visually Impaired, where the training is being offered. The China-US program will bring US experts to China to train teachers at two Chinese schools for the blind each year.

 

Visually impaired children can learn to acquire more knowledge and skills via computer aided technologies that can turn on-screen text into spoken words, said Lawrence Campbell, one of the five experts with the Overbrook School for the Blind based in Philadelphia.

 

Campbell says visually impaired people can also become lawyers, teachers or psychologists, rather than only working as massage therapists which many blind people in China are trained to become, said Campbell.

 

Nine Chinese schools for the blind in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Guangdong have joined the training project.

 

Two courses were conducted at Beijing and Zhejiang schools for the blind in August 2005 and April this year.

 

The schools that receive training will also help other schools for the blind in China.

 

China now has an estimated 82.96 million disabled people, including 12.33 million who are visually impaired, according to the results of the Second China National Sample Survey on Disability, which were released last Friday.

 

The school enrollment rate of blind children is about 70 percent in China, leaving more than 3.5 million visually impaired children without schooling.

 

(Xinhua News Agency December 5, 2006)