Hi, I have been a lurker on this list for some time now. Some of you may know me from the time I spent as a volunteer at the NAB Delhi, teaching Visual Basic programming.
Global Learn Day is an annual 24-hour event on the Internet that seeks to promote distance learning around the world. October 8, 2006, is the tenth such occasion. The South Asia portion has a very special keynote speaker, Dr. TV Raman, who is one of the most brilliant programmers around the world. He is blind, and the creator of emacspeak, the revolutionary tool that leverages the versatility of emacs, to make available editing, browsing, mail, calendar and myriad other facilities to the blind. He best exemplifies my belief, that the best writers of software for the disabled are persons with the same disability. Raman is also a great thinker. Example: "I have a somewhat contrarian answer when people allege "emacs/emacspeak has a steep learning curve". The usual expectation is for one to hotly deny that somewhat bogus assertion. My usual response though is "I like steep learning curves -- it gets you ahead faster". " His talk begins at 5:30 AM GMT on October 8. This will be followed by a presentation by Dr. Dipendra Manocha of the National Association for the Blind. Together with him, and a little help from me, two blind programming students, Avneesh and Suman, have successfully written software for a soon to be released cutting-edge Daisy authoring tool, called Obi. We will also talk about initiatives across the Indo-Pak border to promote the use of ICTs by the blind. Please join us for a discussion of how distance learning and other Internet-related technologies can be of assistance to persons with disabilities, and how to take these ideas further. Instructions on how to participate are at http://ben300.com/GLDTEN/?p=52 . Other details at http://www.bfranklin.edu/ Please feel free to forward this to others who may be interested. May I take this opportunity to ask how members of this list feel about Linux and emacspeak? Would there be interest in a workshop at the NAB, where people who are blind can learn to use Linux and emacspeak? Arun Mehta To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
