President A P J Abdul Kalam on Friday urged call centres to provide employment to persons with physical and mental disabilities to facilitate their integration into the society.

With minimum hardware and short training programmes the centres can employ large number of visually challenged people for efficient work, he said.

Kalam, who inaugurated a polytechnic at an organisation working for the benefit of the disabled in Bangalore, called upon the IT community to devise a Braille keyboard with necessary software to convert Braille inputs into text and speech in Indian languages.

He called upon them to provide assistance and quality devices like access ramps and walkways for physically challenged people.

Pointing to the lack of detailed statistics on those with disabilities, the President said less than 20 per cent of them came under the purview of rehabilitation schemes. A majority of the disabled not receiving rehabilitation aid belong to the rural sector and remain under parental care and suffer pain all their lives, he noted.