Kerala for All conclave: A different viewpoint on travel

Join Tiffany Brar at the Kerala for All conclave as she discusses enhancing travel experiences for visually challenged individuals through technology.

It is high time visually challenged people are given audio descriptions while watching movies, in museums and in tourism locales, Tiffany Brar, a visually challenged person and founder of Jyothirgamaya Foundation said here on Sunday.

She was speaking on ‘Seeing travel differently: Navigating the world without sight’, at the two-day Kerala for All conclave convened here by the Kerala Tourism in partnership with The Hindu, that concluded on Sunday.

“At innumerable museums and places of worship in the country, people are told not to ‘touch’ anything. This puts people like me who cannot see in a clueless situation,” Ms. Brar said, while contrasting this with visually challenged visitors to many museums in the West being provided with a handheld device that makes audio announcements.

“The absence of an announcement system in public transport buses is yet another constraint, with the result that I myself have alighted at wrong bus stops in Kerala. In addition, there is need to augment wheelchair accessibility in beaches, waterfalls etc.,” she said.

Referring to instances of discrimination she faced, Ms. Brar spoke of how she was told to sit on the last bench at a school, and was once asked to leave the class for saying the correct answer. She faced discrimination in a ‘premium’ school in central Kerala as well.

Technological advancements in the form of AI and smartphones have come to the help of visually challenged people, Ms. Brar said, and called upon hotels to economise rooms and to have devices to augment accessibility.