Audio library 'Hidden Voices' turns five this April
A chance meeting can often change the course of a life. Kochi psychotherapist Devi Krishna meeting Sudheesh, a visually-challenged teacher, in 2019 was one of those, and a happy one at that. Sudheesh worked in a school at Tirur, 135 km from Kochi, and recounted how suddenly one day he lost his sight due to retinitis pigmentosa, which causes cells in the retina to break down over time and cause an abrupt loss of vision. Sudheesh told Krishna: “The problem for us visually challenged people is that for academic textbooks, there are no audio recordings. We can read by using Braille but many of us prefer to hear. It makes studying easier.”
Krishna’s interest was piqued. “I could do this,” she thought. She proceeded to make recordings of academic books and sent them across to Sudheesh. Encouraged by his positive feedback, she decided to set up a library of audio books for the blind. Hidden Voices was launched the same year. This month, the audio library turns five, and has a reader base of 4,753. The 50-year-old Krishna says, “All are readers are volunteers. They range in age from five to 92, and are from India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Kuwait, the US, Mexico and Singapore. The readers are selected based on their diction, voice tone and clarity.
The books that are read include fiction, non-fiction and magazines. They are aimed at students from kindergarten to college. Once Hidden Voices receives a recording, they look for factual errors and mistakes in diction or pronunciation. The team uses software like Adobe Enhance to edit the recordings. The students get the recording if they send a request on WhatsApp or Telegram. The recordings are available in 17 Indian languages.
The most requested books are in the motivational and self-help categories. Right on top is Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. This is followed by Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Osho is also popular. There are academic books, as well as guides for the preparation for the Union Public Service Commission examination. People ask for the Constitution of India, too. “Incidentally, one reader does not read an entire book. It’s divided among four readers to speed up the process,” says Krishna.
Even though the work is largely volunteer-based, it requires some revenue to connect to as many beneficiaries as possible. Till date, Hidden Voices is run through donations by friends and well-wishers, but Krishna is now looking for corporate funding to scale up the services. “Most of the visually challenged come from financially weak backgrounds. If there is enough funding, it can help us buy laptops and mobile phones for them, and also pays their education fee. I want to be able to do more,” she says.