# Transcript

My name is Aqsa and I am nine years old. I’m going to turn ten in July. I’ve been here for nearly seven years and I joined when I was three years old. I’m glad to be in a special needs school because I am visually impaired and I haven’t got much sight. So then that’s why I read braille instead of print. If I was in a mainstream school, well I wouldn’t get on very well. I’d need help in a lot of things. And then some kids in mainstream are quite rude. I know I’m glad to be in a special needs school that I usually get on with most people and there are small classes. If we were in a big class, big classes make lots of noise and I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my work.

I have a Brailler and that’s got six keys and you have to press a few keys together to make the right letters and they come up on a dot, like dots. You can feel them on paper so it’s accessible. So you put the paper in the brailler and then you can just braille. It’s got a space bar as well. I started when I was around four years old and then, I’m now nearly finished the braille code. I’ve only got, after this book, I think three more books to go until I finish. My brailer does help me. So I usually do writing on that, but sometimes I can do writing on my laptop, but I usually do it on my brailer. On my laptop I’ve got a screen reader. It’s not very good, but it’s called narrator, but it does help me access the laptop.

At school I like to play with my friends and at home I just like to play in the garden. And then also I, like every Wednesday evenings I go to a club called Brownies for girls. The only place that I find a bit difficult is Brownies, but then all the girls except one is nice. So they usually help me and what they do is sometimes I get a bit left out of things, but then my aunt usually helps me, but then it just feels, I feel a bit left out of the girls always pairing up with other people. So when I went on the camp, there were seven people in my group and then we were told to pair up and then they paired up and left me out because I was the seventh. None of them really know me exactly.

I feel safe and I know that I can be who I am. I can chat, I can make friends and stuff like that. I can learn. Since I was in year one, I started growing independent and now I’m pretty independent. It means that I can be myself, I can make friends, and it means I can focus on what I’m doing without a class of 30 children. I know my way around because some mainstream schools are huge.