TUSUR present online map of Tomsk universities accessibility for PWDs

TOMSK, Dec 18 – RIA Tomsk. Employees of Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics (TUSUR) have created an online map of the accessibility of Tomsk universities for students and people with disabilities (PWDs), the press service of the university reported on Friday.

It is specified that the developers of the online map are the employees of the INTEGRO interuniversity center for social and cultural adaptation of students with disabilities created by TUSUR. In their work, they used the data of the research conducted by the center on the accessibility of Tomsk universities for people with disabilities (analysis of information on websites, monitoring of architectural accessibility, questioning and interviewing students with disabilities and other data).

"Accessibility issues are not resolved in all more modern buildings. One can see this by opening the Internet map of the accessibility of universities in the city of Tomsk, which displays the architectural accessibility of Tomsk universities in the Yandex map application and a meaningful description of the educational buildings of each university", - says the message.

It is added that at the moment most of the buildings are "conditionally" or "partially" available. This means that it will be difficult for a students with disabilities to enter and move around the university on their own.

The developers of the Internet map believe that universities need to create a special section on the website, which will collect complete information about the areas of training available for training students with disabilities, and the accessibility of buildings. In their opinion, this would allow to increase the number of applicants with special needs already in 2021.

With reference to the head of INTEGRO Maxim Bersenev, it is reported that at present about 300 people with disabilities study at six Tomsk universities, "this is only about 10% of the total number of potential applicants - young residents of the Tomsk region with disabilities".