BHUBANESWAR: Blind students need not to go after braille text books anymore. A group of 10 professionals, mostly engineers, has prepared audio books for the visually impaired students from Class III to PhD level. While the technocrats have so far recorded more than 500 audio books in five languages and those are available free of cost, they are set to launch a mobile application for easy access of the e-books in audio file format. Founder of WE4YOU, a volunteer organisation, Abhay Mohanta said the development of mobile app is in advanced stage.
Hopefully, it will be ready by end of next month. Once it is launched, students can download audio files of their choice like songs from music apps, he added. “We have audio files of all books prescribed by both HSC and CHSE of Odisha along with different universities. The audio books are available in Odia, Hindi, English, Bengali and Gujrati besides some books of other boards including CBSE,” Mohanta, an electronics and telecommunication engineer, said. Odisha has more than two lakh blind people among whom nearly 30,000 are students (from Class I to PhD level).
They used to suffer due to shortage of adequate braille books. Apart from the text books, the technocrats have converted some guide and reference books for competitive examinations for students and job aspirants. “We send audio files in DVD cassettes on demand to schools, colleges and organisations working for blinds. Students can take the files in pen drive or blue-tooth to listen using their mobile phones or MP3 players.
All audio files have been uploaded in Youtube from where the students can directly download the audio files,” said co-founder Nihar Ranjan Das, a mechanical engineer. So far, nearly 15,000 students from Odisha, West Bengal, Delhi and Bihar have been benefited by using the audio books prepared by the organisation, which has planned to record the books in all Indian languages by 2025 despite challenges like change of syllabus. “We have few audio recording set up in Bhubaneswar which are being used to produce audio books. Besides, we give small microphones to volunteers who can not come to the centre, but can record at their convenience and send us back the audio files,” Mohanta added.