Imagine a world where writing and the printing press had not been
invented. Except for a few braille publications, and volunteers willing
to record audio books, that is the world most blind people live in. The
lucky ones are those with access to a computer, for they have recently
become privy to any text in electronic form. Imagine how exciting it
must be, to suddenly get almost equal access to the written word. If you
are an English speaker, that is.
Many blind persons are professional typists. With typewriters, they had
to be extra careful not to make any mistakes. The computer gives them
the backspace key, and all the benefits of a word processor. If you type
English, that is.
The blind rely on a neat little “screen reader” software called Jaws,
that costs $900, and keeps speaking to the user, reading out what is on
the screen, providing her with all the information she needs to decide
what key to press next. It does not handle Indian languages. So, if you
are a blind Hindi typist, and your office switches from typewriters to
computers, you lose your job.
Under Linux, there is also a screen reader available, called
Gnopernicus. Work is going on to attach Indian-language text to speech
to it. With a little extra effort, the whole range of Linux software
can, through Gnopernicus, become accessible to the blind. Computers are
rapidly becoming affordable to the blind, considering the benefit they
provide. A little effort by Linux geeks, to help the transition of blind
users to Linux, will dramatically increase the number of Linux users in
years to come. Additionally, this effort will benefit a far wider
community, you and me included.
Those of us who can speak a language but not read the script, are in the
same position as the blind with regard to any written material in that
language. When driving, or engaged in activities that demand the
attention of our eyes, we are effectively blind from the point of view
of the computer that is trying to navigate us, or to display a text
message on a tiny screen. Thus, software for the blind is very useful
for sighted persons as well, particularly in a country such as India,
where we have over a dozen scripts, and illiteracy is high. There is
therefore a huge professional opportunity here for developers and
deployers of computer technology.
With a view to opening the eyes of geeks to such opportunities, on
Sunday, July 17, 2005, the National Association of the Blind, RK Puram,
would like to invite the Delhi Linux users group to a gettogether. The
tentative agenda is as follows:
Dr. Dipendra Manocha will provide an introduction to the work being done
at the technology center. In particular, he will talk about Daisy,
www.daisy.org, a standard and system for content production, that
effectively marries text with audio, so that users have the pleasure of
listening to quality audio, while retaining the benefits of text, such
as the ability to use search facilities, and to edit efficiently. This
is a very interesting area with many opportunities for software development.
Students and faculty of the NAB will then demonstrate their use of
diverse software packages. This part of the event will hopefully
irritate our guests, for almost all they will see is software running on
the MS Windows platform. This segment will show them, however, how
useful computers can be in the lives of the “print challenged,” and
provide them the incentive to make equivalent software work for the
blind on the Linux platform, which we have not very successfully been
trying to do at the NAB.
Arun Mehta will then make a presentation on Technology, Abilities and
Disabilities, the outline can be found and commented on at
http://www.india-gii.org/wiki/index.php/Presentations/ITandDisability
We will then have a general discussion, with a view to identifying
projects that are interesting to work on, for which funding may be
available, and have applications for both the sighted and the blind.
All are cordially invited.
Our first project will be a simple eBook reader,
http://www.india-gii.org/wiki/index.php/Projects/mobile_eBook_reader .
Thanks to Dipendra Manocha for detailing the specifications as soon as
we asked him for an idea!
This reader could grow into a full-fledged Daisy editor, which is
described at
http://www.india-gii.org/wiki/index.php/Projects/mobile_Daisy_creator
If you would like to help, but cannot come, here is a list of what we
would like to learn in Java:
http://www.india-gii.org/wiki/index.php/Java_wish_list -- your
suggestions on appropriate courseware would be terrific.
Arun
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