Integration of ICT assistive technology to learners with disabilities in Rwanda secondary schools. Case study “HVP Gatagara Secondary School”

Abstract

The students with learning disabilities in any society are generally facing many debilitating quandaries, including physical, emotional and physiological degradation. They are likely to have poorer health, less education, less economic opportunity when they grow up, and are more likely to live in poverty and deal with greater inequalities than their peers without disabilities. Using technology can help students with disabilities to enhance and improve their independence in academic and employment tasks, their participation in classroom discussions, along with helping them to accomplish some difficult academic tasks. This research study proposed to develop and implemented an ICT assistive system technology (Izere App) to learners with disabilities in Rwanda secondary schools using two technologies that are Automatic Speech Recognition and Text to Speech with the aid of two programming languages HTML and Java Script. This ICT assistive system will help physical, vision and hardly speech disability learners to automatically get the translated spoken words into text and vice versa for their learning. As a result, empowering students with learning disabilities to realize their self-esteem as well as to enhance their skilling and employability represent challenging task to government. This novel technology has proven to give a high performance rate of disabilities learners in Rwandan Secondary schools, specifically in HVP Gatagara/Huye.