ComBank donates laptops to visually-impaired undergraduates

Commercial Bank’s Chief Manager – Operations Department and CSR Trust Coordinator Najith Meewanage presenting a laptop to a student 

The Commercial Bank of Ceylon recently donated 21 laptop computers to visually-handicapped university students, in response to a request by the ‘Centre for Sight’ of the Kandy Teaching Hospital’s Department of Ophthalmology, the institution that handles ophthalmic disorders and helps visually handicapped students to gain admissions to universities in Sri Lanka. 

The latest presentation takes the number of undergraduates in this category that have received laptops from the bank to 62. The bank donated laptops to two groups of vision-impaired students attending universities around the country in 2014 and 2015.

The laptops donated by the bank will be installed with a special software program. Titled ‘Jaws,’ the software reads out what is being typed on the keyboard, enabling users to correct their mistakes. The laptops are also especially useful to these students, because although they are unable to read printed text, they can read enlarged e-text, the bank said.

By making this donation through the ‘Centre for Sight’ Commercial Bank is supporting the national low vision program which is a discipline under the V2020 program of the Ministry of Health of Sri Lanka, under which the Department of Ophthalmology was established in 1992.