Today, on April 28 with the support of Orange Armenia, computer rooms with internet access were opened at Yerevan's N 14 special school for children with visual impairments and at the special educational complex for children with hearing impairments.

“As a telecommunications company our business mission is to facilitate communication among people and cover distances.

However, we are also responsible for extending a helping hand to those who due to their disabilities or other reasons are isolated from the surrounding world and are unable to benefit from telecommunications opportunities. From now on these children will have almost the same opportunities as their peers, and for the children with disabilities it is even more important to gain computer skills from early years, as they will provide them with much more opportunities to be independent and self-reliant in future,” Orange Armenia CEO Bruno Duthoit said.

Computer needs of those with visual impairments are different from ordinary needs, and therefore many years ago a special software AREV was developed by National Institute of Mathematical Machines, the updated versions of which could not be run on old computers available at school. New computers will enable the children to benefit from the opportunities provided by the state-of-the-art technologies, i.e., use internet, scan text and listen to scanned e-text, obtain other computer skills, etc.

Computer room is equipped with 7 computers, a projector, printer/scanner and Orange Flybox router.

Special school N 14 for children with visual impairments is the only suchlike school in the whole republic. It has been operating since 1939 and has 96 pupils (age of 6-20), including children from RA regions who stay at school at night. Here the children study for 12 years and after graduating around 90% of the them enter higher educational institutions.

The special school N 154 for children with hearing impairments has 154 pupils, with children from RA regions and Nagorno Karabakh among them.

Orange has allotted total AMD 5,204,600 to open computer rooms in these two special schools, according to a press release.