It is a truth universally acknowledged that rehabilitation concepts for the visually impaired is becoming more effective with the development of modern sciences which enabled creative people invent high-technology assistive devices to help the blind and/or low vision perform their expected tasks.

In early times when the term enabling technology was dominant; later on changed to be adaptive technology, peoples’ beliefs were different as such terms may reflect the social attitude towards the blind and/or low vision community whom regarded as different people in need of such enabling devices or adaptive software to be able to cope with the normal life. On the contrary, the widespread assistive devices and/or software could hardly be ignored when talking about blind/low vision rehabilitation.

So, assistive tools is a term assigned to cover all assistive devices starting from the little stylus and the pulsing white cane up to the modern software systems that are not limited to special computers, Braille embossers and screen readers, but also include elevator talking systems as well as talking fridge thermometers, washing machine programs, talking thermometers, talking pressure systems, talking clocks and kitchen aids and all other devices and software that help the blind/low vision (or any other disabled people) perform their office jobs and social roles without the least need to depend on a companion or sighted peer to help.

There is not the least doubt that assistive technology is nothing but the fruit of the progress of scientific research, lab activities and technological advances as there is no assistive software or device was to come up without creative scientists, dedicated developpers, courageous businessmen who value science and sure of the vital role and high productivity of this community they invest to promote.
For instance, one of the major widespread assistive software applications are the screen reading software programs which could hardly be released without prior scientific research in phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntactic theories and pregmatic concepts, then comes another area of research which studies the human language from a computational prospective to extract the necessary rules for computers to understand our human language rules, after that comes another important area of study related to Human Computer Interaction that is to create all necessary accessibility sollutions for a blind to deal with computers, then comes the role of software production companies that has large teams of programmers, beta testers, marketing specialists, software developpers, professional trainers who customize software performances, advanced users who come up with best possible rules to help themselves and their mates.
Thus, the development cycle of assistive devices is shown properly as a real application for hard sciences that serve humanity. Again, it is now obvious that blind/low vision rehabilitation process is not just limited to the efforts of dedicated voluntary social activities and concerned NGO’s, but extended to include eye doctors and eyecare specialists, engineers, programmers, and all concerned people who serve the blind/low vision community.

Thus, the role of our leading institution, namely, Eshraqat Alfager is to spread the proper use of assistive technology as a final role to complete the rehabilitation cycle mentioned. We are committed to delivering all required assistive tools for the blind/low vision from all over the world to localize (or share in localizing) them for the sake of the Blind Arab community to get all possible care and rehabilitation required for them to perform their social roles effectively.

Eventually, as we are committed to serve the blind, it is worth mentioning that more than 40% of Eshraqat Alfager employees are themselves blind and professional assistive technology users.