November 2022 – Society for the Empowerment of DeafBlind

Empower 2022 conference was held from 13th to 15th October 2022 at IITM Research Park, Chennai.We were invited to attend the conference. The Founder of Society for the Empowerment of the Deaf-Blind, (SEDB), Mr. Zamir Dhale decided to send his colleagues, Mr. Sunil Abbas, General Secretary and Mr. c Sinha, Chairman to attend the conference. The tactile signing interpreters and Access Providers were provided by the conference and Chetana Trust, Chennai. Through the workshop, Mr. Kesavan, Mr. Rajesh, Mr. Ambrose, Dr. Namita, Ms. Sudha and Ms. Teresa were there to help us with interpretation and worked very hard to provide access. We are very grateful for their support. We used to book taxis independently through Uber and Ola but the support of the access provider was really appreciated.

People who attended the conference learned a lot about the deafblind people like us. When they met and interacted with us, they understood that tactile communication and specialized interpreters are very important for deafblind people to learn to communicate and understand the whole world. So many people wanted to meet and interact with us to understand deafblind issues. They were not aware about the difficulties of deafblind people.

We visited many different exhibits and learned about the latest devices developed for persons with disabilities. We learned for the first time about the wheelchair which helps a person with locomotor impairment to stand up independently.

Another innovation is by a company called Neomotion. It is a wheelchair with a connection that converts it into a bike. A wheelchair user can drive on road with it. Pradip decided to try and surprised everyone when he learnt to drive correctly. He looked very confident on bike and everyone was impressed.

We explored many different devices for the visually impaired persons and gave some feedback which can be useful for the deafblind as well, by making the app screen-reader friendly. We were excited to purchase very good and useful canes from the exhibition. Through the conference, we interacted with lots of people with disabilities from all across India and we learned a lot from their experiences and success stories.

In the workshop, we learned how thermoplastics can be cut, heated and quickly moulded to make it easy for people with hand injuries and weaknesses to hold pencils or tools and do many activities. It was a practical workshop and very interesting. There was also a visit to "Museum of Possibilities" (MOP) where all kinds of assistive technologies are displayed in areas like leisure, daily life, work and communication. There were many speakers on assistive technology like Mr Kasnabis from WHO and Dr. Namita also presented on technology and early reading. There were different awards and competition winners and one team got a gift of one lakh!

Thanks to the Empower 2022 conference, for giving us many opportunities to learn a lot of new experiences in our life. Nothing is impossible. The blind person is a tough life, Deaf is also a tough life but deafblind is the toughest life. Next year, IIT Madras will host the Empower 2023 conference again. We hope that it will increase the technologies available to persons who are deafblind

I would like to share a exciting news with you all. We (Pradip Sinha -The Chairman | Sunil Abbas – The General Secretary and Zamir Dhale – The Founder of the SEDB, India) went to attend the 6th General Assembly at World federation Of The Deaf-Blind (WFDB) that hosted the workshop in Nairobi, Kenya from 24th to 29th of October 2022. It was an great opportunity to network with various deafblind leaders across the globe. We were able to share and enrich our rich knowledge and experiences of each one of our journey in empowering deaf-blind across geographic locations. We strongly believe this knowledge is very rich and will help us to achieve many successes. We learned and shared our experiences with each other. We learned a lot from their experiences. We also learned to understand many different laws. It was a very different. We motivated Kenyan who are deaf and deafblind that they are facing problems such as discriminations against law and they were advised to overcome all difficulties and problems in their life.

WFDB and Sense International UK team members have made a 2^nd global report on deafblindness, which we discussed elaborately and mutually agreed on the report and it will go to UN for the approval, I do hope that we will show the globe report to Government Of India.

Some of deafblind leaders from Spain, Sweden, Ecuador, Colombia and North America are very strong in advocating. They talked a lot in the discussion groups about the rights to information means deafblind should have the knowledge of different laws and how to build their skills. We discussed about accessible health and technologies in advocacy work. We, the deafblind Indians are luckily to have many deafblind advocates and lawyers in the world. The current president of WFDB is Ms. Sania who is deafblind woman from Croatia has completed PhD. The Vice President is Mr. Samuel. These two people and myself (Zamir) have been elected as Asia Regional Representative of the WFDB board. So the three of the new board members are deafblind. I strongly feel that government of India will be recognise deafblind people and we need to make the government officials understand deafblind people have the rights to ask for better education training, access to technologies and employment. We should have the equal rights like others. Deafblind should have a separate disability as a unique disability.

Have you ever wondered on these questions? What are your rights? What is my rights? What is the importance of advocacy? Advocacy is important because deafblind people wanted to educate people about how to help deafblind in communication, education, training and good job to help them to earn equal salaries, not to depend on anyone for all help. Why does government of India not wanted to recognise as deafblind category and make it mixed up deaf-blindness in disability law with Multiple disabilities. Why can’t deafblind be a separate disability?

We believe that we will do hard work to make government to understand, We got continue to raise voices about our rights and needs till its heard and is answered.

Empower 2022 Conference

A Report on Our Trip to Kenya