An Amazing Blind Personality from Nepal
Dear Friends,
Today I am going to introduce to you an amazing blind personality from
Nepal-Him Prasad Gautam. He is a gentleman of fifty-five with low vision.
His residual vision is about thirty percent. He is a master in civil
engineering. He works as an engineer in the water works department of
Nepal.
Exactly eleven years ago, he encountered the problem of sight. One
morning,
when he got up, it was not a good morningfor him. He experienced that he
had
lost about seventy percent of vision.
Naturally he was dejected. But he did not despair. Nobody knew God had a
plan for him.
One day he came to know about JAWS and got a copy of it. He was thrilled.
He
found a way to compromise with his loss of vision. Now he could use the
computer with ease.
But most of the official correspondence in Nepal is done in Nepali, not
in
English. So he felt he needed a TTS for Nepali. He found a cause in his
life. He set upon the task of developing a TTS engine for Nepali which
could
work with JAWS.
He went after it day and night. After the hard work of six long years, he
finally succeeded in developing one. He developed and re-developed it
several times until it became competent to his satisfaction. What a
surprise! A civil engineer developed a TTS engine!
Now developing TTS engines for others languages became his passion. He
developed such software for Urdu, Sinhala, and now for my mother tongue
Gujarati.
The happy news for Uriya and Bengali people today. Today he is going to
release a TTS engine for Uriya and Bengali.
I have to informa you about another important thing. He felt that writing
in
our regional languages on the computer is another handicap of the
visually
challenged. So undertook the task of enabling the blind in this field. So
he
developed software which can make the task of writing in the regional
languages easy. First he prepared such a software in his own
language-Nepali. Later on, he paid attention to developing such Varnamala
in
other languages like Hindi, Telugu, Uriya Bengali, Gujarati etc. I am
pleased to declare that now I can freely write Gujarati on my computer
solely due to Mr Him Prasad Gautam. Nowadays I keep on talking to my
Gujarati fellows, and I assure you that they are extremely excited in
this
regard. We are unable to repay his debt.
I am proud of him when I say that he expects nothing from us when works
for
us. He is a God given gift to us. He is completely dedicated to service
to
the visually challenged.
Now I paste below the text of the news in a leading Nepali newspaper on
the
front page.
It was when Him Prasad Gautam first released the Nepali TTS. Now follows
that text:
Dristiwachak setting a clear viewpoint
UJJWALA MAHARJAN
During a program at Nepal Association of the Blind (NAB) in Maharajgunj
on
January 21, people, mostly with black goggles, gleamed with excitement.
Tapping their white canes on the soft ground, a group of girls made their
way through the blue chairs lined up in neat rows.
In no time, the NAB backyard was filled with a mixed crowd of people of
different ages. There were
mainly two groups of people -- those who could see and those who
couldn't.
But both groups could equally feel the excitement in the air.
"Who is sitting beside me?" asked Suresh Rajbhandari, a school teacher
from
Kapilvastu. After a formal introduction he said, "I remember, because
there
were no law books in Braille when I was studying law, I had to depend on
the
lectures or have my friends read out to me and record it in cassettes."
But things were about to change radically, for good. Rajbhandari and many
others had gathered at NAB for the launch of Dristiwachak, a Nepali
Screen
Reader software.
"This is indeed a historic moment in the technological development for us
blind and partially sighted (BPS) people in Nepal, isn't it?" an animated
Shova Neupane, the program officer at NAB and the host for the day said
on
the microphone.
And the audience unanimously cheered, "Yes!"
***
"The software will help increase the information accessibility for BPS
people, from e-books to internet and also chat," Neupane told the Week,
"It
will not only help improve literacy among the blind but also their
education
level and with it add value to their life."
Designed by Him Gautam, currently working as the senior divisional
engineer
at Department of Water Supply and Sewerage, the software is intended to
help
visually impaired people like himself, to listen and understand the text
on
the computer screen; and all that in our own mother tongue-Nepali.
Namaskar, Nepali Dristiwachack ma tapain lai swagat chha (Namaskar, I
welcome you to the Nepali Screen Reader): Gautam's voice greets the
computer
user as the software is activated.
"A, aa, ee, u" -- human voices, sounding like that of a child or woman's,
recite along every Devanagari (commonly used script in Nepal and India)
letter and symbol as Gautam types. However, when it reads out a sentence,
it
speaks in an alien sounding machine voice "Mey-ro de-sha ko naam Ne-pa-la
ho."
All along, the audience responds with liveliness and enthusiasm, flooding
him with barrage of questions and queries. Even after the end of the
program, Gautam was busy answering questions. His enthusiasm matched
theirs
as he frantically struggled to communicate over a microphone that kept
going
on and off. You could see it in his face how badly he wanted to make sure
that they fully understood how the software worked and how they could
benefit from it.
"This is the most emotional day of my life," a tearful Gautam said.
***
The third night of Dashain in 2058, Gautam had gone to bed like he
normally
would and had woken up next morning to find that his life had changed
forever. He was loosing his eye-sight. Since that day on, he could not
have
a clear view of things.
He, however, never lost the ability of having a clear viewpoint. The
disability was not going to defeat him.
Gautam had never learned computer programming in his life, except for
basic
office packages. But when his partial blindness started hampering his
studies, his hunger for knowledge and his life, he set out to develop a
software that could overcome this barrier.
There already was a software called Jaws that read out everything in
English
but none that would read Nepali texts. He then taught himself about
developing fonts and speech software program, and collected almost 70
Nepali
fonts. He spent a long time studying them, making his own font and
converting the other fonts into his own. But once he realized that Nepali
Unicode was the common font used in most texts available in the net, he
erased his font and decided to work with Unicode for his software.
With a single-minded determination, he toiled day and night for six long
years, often locked up in his room. "I set myself on to make this
software
all alone, without any help from anyone. Either I was going to complete
it
myself or accept my defeat and tell no one about it. Even my family had
no
clue what I was doing."
But once he completed the project, he realized this was not only his need
but of many like him. He then approached NAB and had some BPS people test
it. After their suggestions and feedback, he finally developed the
package.
"This is not an independent software, as you need to have Jaws installed
in
your computer to make it work."
Because people don't use computer in Nepali language, you need Jaws to
read
out texts in English. But Jaws doesn't read Nepali Unicode and that's
when
Dristiwachak comes in. "If computers operated fully in Nepali language,
then
we would not have needed Jaws. But we use Nepali only when we're using
applications like Word or PowerPoint, so the two software work
complimentary
to each other."
Gautam is still working on the software to make it more sensitive on
passive
reading. "A blind person can not distinguish between the number '4' and
the
word 'four' or read symbols like semicolons. For that kind of passive
reading, I've mixed voices in different pitch that can tell them the
difference."
According to him, passive reading is taken for granted by most people,
but
it is an important part for basic learning. He admits, though, that he
too
realized it only after he started loosing his sight. "When I lost my
eyesight, I gained new perspectives and new viewpoint."
"Everyone in this world is disabled. For instance, you need a pen to
write,
without which you'll feel disabled too. There are always things that one
can
do and things that one can't. BPS people may not be able to do some
things,
but they can excel at others, if given opportunity and access for
learning."
And Dristiwachak is Gautam's effort to help provide the opportunity and
accessibility as he strongly believes no disability should deprive one
from
learning.
***
A flash review report of the National Blindness Survey of World Health
Organization conducted by B.P. Koirala Lions Eye Care Foundation in 2008
states that there are 30,240 school going BPS children. But only about
6000
are getting educational opportunity. About 750 BPS students have passed
SLC,
200 have passed graduate diploma, 50 have passed their master's degree
and
only one has finished PhD.
"Though the education for blind started in 1964, BPS students are still
facing problems like lack of text books and reading materials in
accessible
form and blind friendly teaching and learning environment," says Nar
Bahadur
Limbu, President of NAB. "This software will overcome that barrier as it
opens up the possibility of online education in Nepali language for BPS
people enabling them to pursue higher education."
The software is now available at NAB, where they have been promoting and
distributing it with the support from Australian Embassy's Direct Aid
Program (DAP). "We install or prepare a copy of the software free of
cost.
We also install Jaws and Nepali Unicode, necessary for Dristiwachak to
work,
if the interested person doesn't have them already. It will also be set
up
for free download in our website nabnepal.org soon."
Sugam Bhattarai, one of the students in the first computer training batch
at
NAB, who has been using and testing Dristiwachak since past six months,
said, "I have been using it to read Nepali novels and texts that are
available in the net and also for chats. I was finally able to read Muna
Madan. It is definitely a success for me."
For Gautam, however, the software won't spell success until it becomes an
actual help in changing BPS people's lives and giving them access to
knowledge and barrier free communication.
Published on 2011-01-28 10:33:56
Main Page
Ashik Hirani
9428855867
8000775222
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