HYDERABAD: As times are advancing, we as a community are acquiring more and more knowledge everyday. Innumerable books and websites are being published everyday. But the visually impaired remain almost untouched.
BrailleMe, affordable solution
Producing Braille text is expensive and the contemporary technology that converts text into audio is not up to the mark. Aiding devices that covert digitised text into Braille are available in the market, but the price range starts at Rs 2 lakh. In midst of all this, a team of passionate young engineers from IIT-B has come up with BrailleMe for just Rs 20,000.
It is 10 times cheaper than any other refreshable Braille display product in the world. It is Kindle for the visually impaired as it renders any digitised text into Braille. It will make social networking and word processing easy and accessible. It is multilingual, ergonomic, affordable and easily accessible.
Innovators and teams from across the country gathered at Microsoft’s first ever Accessibility Summit in Hyderabad last week to work out more such solutions. The summit tried to enhance technology access for Persons with Disabilities (PwD) and demonstrating business value of accessible technology for
organisations.
The summit, which brought together thought leaders, representatives from the government and technology innovators for disability inclusion in India, aimed at collaborative effort and policy’s role for creating accessible India.
Madhu Khatri, Associate General Counsel and Accessibility Lead, Microsoft Corporation India, said that there are more than 1 billion people in the world battling disability and India has the largest population of them. “Our system in not very inclusive of PwD. Microsoft is trying to make everything accessible to them from buildings to softwares. Apart from developing new products, we are trying to make its core products more accessible and inclusive.
Applications like OneNote come with features like screen reader for dyslexic people which helped them to read average 60 words per minute which was four words per minute prior to that. Project Emma is a watch that helps patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease control their tremors. Over 10 million people in the world suffer from Parkinson’s disease. Following which Navreet Kang, Secretary of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment said that under Accessibility India Campaign the three basic infrastructures which is buildings, transport and Information and Computer Technologies will be retrofitted for better accessibility.
Over 1700 buildings in 50 cities will be refurbished under which money has been released on an average of Rs 20-25 lakhs for 700 buildings. The Town Planning Department under Ministry of Urban Development has released guidelines and rules for contractors and monitoring. 659 railway stations have been retrofitted with ramps, elevators and escalators.
Around 1000 government websites have been updated with accessible features. Under the PwD Act, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs has ordered all the products and services in the market to be accessible to PwD within 2 years. Earlier guidelines were issued and subsequently laws were introduces and standardised measures were enabled to check buildings and charge contractors.
White Cane innovation
Young innovators demonstrated their devices in which White Cane stood out as a state-of-the-art technology in the world right now. It is a virtual assistant for the visually impaired created by three young minds Barnopriyo Barua, Divyash Gupta and Kaustubh Mani from IIT Kharagpur who won the Microsoft Imagine Cup with this project.
White Cane is made for everyday use as it comes with a feature called the ‘seen description’ which will see the place or object in front of the person and describe it to the user. It can identify almost everything. The Optical Character Recognition feature will read back any text in front of it, be it a newspaper or a signboard. It can also engage in visual Q&A replying according to the question of the user.
They met with the National Association for Blind (NAB), Delhi to seek suggestions for the device and added currency recognition accordingly. It can detect obstacles while navigation to help the visually impaired. It can also be of great use to senior citizens and our vision degenerates with age. Kaustubh says the competition at Imagine Cup motivated them to excel at it.
The application was developed and currently runs on Microsoft’s server. The application is available on Play Store on android platform and the rest are awaited.
A team from BVRIT Hyderabad caught everyone’s attention with their brilliant inexpensive devices such as OJAS wireless water level monitoring and control system which runs through app and transcends the connectivity distance barrier available in the market for Rs. 3000. They have also devised various other products.
Several other innovators were also present with their sci-fi projects showing us a glimpse of the near future which seems hopeful and bright for Persons with Disability.