Imagine hitting a button on the keyboard of your computer and hearing a robot-llike voice reading out Jane Austen to you. And we are definitely not talking about an audio-player! Welcome to the world of books and reference material for the reading impaired. It took Professor Vinod Sena seven years of hard work to put together the most comprehensive and probably the only website of its kind of the visually challenged in India. The website www.indev.nic...@shruti launched recently at the British Council offers a host of information resources, audio-books and catalogues and two online magazines for the blind and the Print-disabled, such as dyslexics, by talking to them. Created by Sena’s Shruti Information Centre, the site was specially designed and hosted on Indev, the British Council’s electronic gateway to development information. Indev offers support to NGO’S and other social organizations by offering information and web-hosting facilities. It was formerly launched by Arun Shourie, Union Minister for Comunication and Information Technology, and for Disinvestment, at the British Council. He was so impressed with the effort that he announced a grant of Rs 50 lakh to continue and develop the work and encourage networking. Professor Sena whose been visually challenged since the age of three months, has experienced all the challenges that people with disability face in the modern world. One of the biggest challenges, he felt, was being excluded from the single biggest community in the world today-the World Wide Web. This made Sena launch a massive effort to make a site for the visually challenged. The Shruti website has three major sections. The first covers text resources and provides a comprehensive catalogue of audio books in India. You can “hear” electronic texts as synthesized speech. The second section has comprehensive information on a wide range of subjects including government concessions and services for the blind,lists of schools and hospitals and even tips on planning a vacation. The third section has two online quarterly magazines, Shruti Mag for adults and Shruti Junior for young readers. The website is completely audio accessible and operating it does not need any help from a sighted person. All you need is a keyboard and screen reading software such as JAWS [Job Accessible with Speech]. This unique software uses a simple combination of three keys to control the speed of reding, the volume and navigation. Sena firmly believes that the only way forward is through partnerships with similar organizations across the world. The Royal National Institute for the Blind in the UK has already given him permission to use their material on his website. He has formed similar ties with the Braille Monitor in the USA. He hopes that younger people in India will volunteer to take his work forwarde. Professor Sena’s dream is to have a national library service for the blind. While working towards that, he will continue to add to the Shruti website in terms of general information, statistical information on blindness in India, key documents of global importance on disability and, most importantly, texts in Hindi, as soon as a reading software for Hindi hits the market. Sena hopes that accesss to the website will give the strength to the blind to be more “proactive” to seize opportunities, fight for their rights and overcome obstacles and ignorance. Connecting January 2005 The British Council Magazine in India thanks, mukesh jain.
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