Tamkeen concludes its summer camp activities

This was the second time Tamkeen organizes the camp.

This year, the camp focused on teaching its visually-impaired students computer literacy and some life skills that would help raise their social awareness and interaction. Those skills were taught through the direct communication, as well as movement and orientation recognition programs.

The number of attendees for this summer included nine high school and two college students, where as the previous summer camp had five attendees only. According to Awatif Al Akbari, head of training department at Tamkeen, "The computer literacy course was to help familiarizing the students with the internet, while the movement and orientation course provided them with White Canes and taught them how to use them to figure out directions."

Al Akbari continued, "College education relies heavily nowadays on technology, thus we aimed on training our visually-impaired students to use computers through the help of 'the screen reader,' which is a program that reads the written contents on the screen so that the student can listen to what is on the screen instead of read it. This would ultimately help the students with studying, researching, and taking notes."

She added that Tamkeen will provide the visually-impaired students with more training programs to help them smoothly proceed with their academic life.

H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum established Tamkeen to empower the visually-impaired members of the society to become active members, as well as to train and advice the citizens and corporations on how best to deal with those members and provide them with a suitable and friendly environment. The objective is to integrate the visually-impaired into the society and enable them to have a positive productive role within it.