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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