Hang on, tutor is not human but machine in the offing! http://www.deccanherald.com/content/474195/personal-tutor-every-blind-child.html Henna Rakheja, April 28, 2015, DHNS:
Transformative technology A rectangular box resembling a playstation or video game appears a little different. The bright red and yellow combination is one of the reasons for its attractive look. But this is neither a game box nor another gizmo - it is called 'Braille Tutor'. Probably for the first time in the world, a machine has been created to aid parents, guardians and teachers to teach Braille language to the visually impaired at such an economical price. It isn't just a portable device but a means to enable the knowledgeable, to empower the visually impaired right from childhood or at any stage of life, with education. The credit for this innovative ideation goes to a group of six IITians from computer science engineering who worked under the guidance of their professor M Balakrishnan. "The largest population of visually impaired in the world is in India and, there is no machine to help those who live in remote parts of the country. Even in Delhi, the ratio of an educator to special child is 1: 290," says Abhinav Singh, one of the creators, sharing the stark picture of how difficult it is for a special child to get education. "Teaching Braille to visually impaired children is resource-intensive and requires constant supervision by trained, special education teachers," says Ritesh Baldva emphasising on the high cost of available assistive technologies. "Also, they are limited in scope and most of them don't contain any interactive tutoring exercises," their teammate Tajveer Singh chips in. The young boys thus decided to create something that is inexpensive, user-friendly and expandable, to be used in classrooms for people with special needs. Abhinav Singh elucidates, "The Braille Tutor is an interactive, multimodal and self-engaging portable device to aid Braille-based learning for the visually impaired in multiple languages - without compromising on the quality of education that is imparted to the students." The ability of this device to be expanded to regional languages makes it one-of-its-kind. Also, there is a three-way learning system - visual output, audio output and tactile output. There is a sheet with codes kept alongside the device and the students use the same to demonstrate and explain to Metrolife, how the device functions. One actually feels overwhelmed to be able to use it after a quick tutorial and revel in the thought of being able to teach a visually impaired child in not just Hindi or English, but any regional language, once fed into the system. "We have even added games in this because we felt that the focus should not just be on learning but entertainment as well," says Baldva explaining how the alphabets are phonetically mapped and a 'K' in English is replaceable with 'k' in Hindi. When out in the commercial market, the device is estimated to cost between Rs 6,000-8,000, which is very less when compared to similar devices available in the international market which start from two thousand dollars. For a parent of a special child, the device is a boon since Braille is an old and developed language. Despite considerable improvements in text to speech and voice recognition technology, Braille remains the most versatile medium for educational content for the visually impaired even today. It is therefore significant to encourage such a link between the old methodology and new technology, rather than discarding the old for the new. The trials and testing is still on. "We had given the device to students at a renowned school for the visually impaired who complained of the voice being too mechanical. We are working on that," informs Baldva, as one waits for this invention to reform education levels for visually impaired in the Indian society. -- Avinash Shahi Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ 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 Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list..
