Tashkent, October 13, 2009 - Every week, starting mid-October till the end of November 2009, the training sessions on computer skills will be delivered at UNDP’s project ICTP for people with impaired vision.

About 10 people with disabilities participate in the training. The participants are the representatives of Uzbek Society of the Blind and students of Uzbekistan educational institutions, who during the classes will learn the basics of HTML, Java Script, and work in Windows, Excel, Internet, as well as acquire skills for creating websites on their own with the assistance of JAWS program for people with impaired vision. JAWS (Job Access With Speech) is a screen reading computer program designed for people with impaired vision. Its purpose is to make personal computers working on Microsoft Windows operating system accessible for blind and visually impaired users. JAWS voices information reading the text displayed on the screen and the Braille system allows unlimited use of keyboard.

Organizers of the training are UNDP projects - ACCESS and "ICT Policy" (ICTP), Center of Young Political Scientists at the National University of Uzbekistan, as well as the Youth Network of the representatives of World Bank in Uzbekistan.

According Oybek Makhmudov, co-organizer of the event, this kind of training helps people with impaired vision to understand and "feel" the world of information technology, to create their own pages on the Internet, find friends, chat. This, in turn, helps them to feel themselves a full member of society.

This training is the second phase of the training on computer skills for people with impaired vision, which was previously held by the World Bank in Uzbekistan. During the first phase of the training most successful participants were identified and offered to continue their studies in the field of information technologies. In future, these participants will be able to teach computer literacy to other visually impaired people on their own.

It should be noted, that two participants of the training are working on their own business plan now and another participant of such training Dildora Akbutaeva has been invited by the newspapers “Turkiston" and "Youth of Uzbekistan" to work as a freelance reporter.

According to the organizers of the training, the purpose of this event is to prepare participants for the upcoming video conference, which is scheduled for December 2009 and where people with disabilities from Europe and CIS will participate.

In future it is planned to deliver a series of training sessions in humanitarian, economic and technical fields for visually impaired people.