They are working hard to score well in the board exams hearing their lessons on cassette recorders for many hours; struggling with computer keys and memorising Braille texts.But, these visually-challenged students are also worrying about writers (scribes), who will write the exams on their behalf. Says Hari Narayan, a Class X student from Mount Carmel, “I am more worried about the scribe. Will he be able to draw diagrams for me?”As per norms, scribes should be a year junior to the student.For Class XII students, they should be from a different stream. Scribes allotted to the visually-challenged students often don’t understand what a student is saying. Moreover, finding scribes is itself quite a task. Neither does the CBSE, nor the school help the students in this regard.“Sometimes scribes don’t turn up at exam centres,” informs Prof CD Tamboli, director, National Association for the Blind (NAB). CBSE had allowed use of computers for writing boards in 2003.“But due to lack of training in computers, students are still dependent on scribes,” Dipendra Manocha, director of IT, NAB said.
