Technology to help disabled students

The various events conducted over the course of the three days were divided into four sections or “tracks”.

The conference was organised in part to bring people working in the field in the same platform to assess the progress being made and increase the awareness amongst persons with disabilities on the progress that is being made in terms of accessibility of knowledge.

New technology

The second day of the conference saw seminars and round table sessions held amongst scientists, researchers and academicians discussing the Optical Character Technology. This technology is used to convert images of written text into electronically editable text.

Scientists and scholars who are currently working in a software that would do the same for Indian languages discussed ways in which it would be qualitatively useful for persons who are visually impaired.

Research and development in this field is being funded by the Ministry of Communication and Information technology.

Over a hundred students along with academicians attended the session

Some of the themes explored in the morning session were the problems encountered during Unicode and Braille conversions, development of the software to include different Indian languages and the uses of the software in the field of education.

“This software converts images from books into electronic text which can then either be converted into an audio book or a Braille book,” said Dr A G Ramakrishnan, professor at Indian Institute of Electrical Engineering in Bangalore. “Also this would be extremely imperative to students who wish to study in their own vernacular.”

Currently the software supports about ten Indian languages and it was demonstrated during the afternoon session.

“Indian languages are more complex than English and the software has to be refined to be able to recognise characters and words,” said Dr Ramakrishnan.

He also noted relatively low number of Braille printing presses in the country as opposed to regular printing presses. “Therefore a visually impaired person does not have access to the wide array of books available otherwise. This software essentially makes the access of such information possible.”

Special needs

The day also saw a workshop held for students and graduates who are visually impaired. The workshop that was conducted by Bangalore based NGO Enable India helped equip the students with skills required to be gainfully employed.

Santosh Kumar from Enable India said, “We want to help these students to develop their thinking power and social interaction and we do this through personality development activities and interactive and role play sessions.”

One of the participants at the end of the workshop agreed with the organisers and proclaimed that workshop changed the way he “approached life” and that he would definitely use it to explore himself.