Eye-openers!…….Swati Soni
The Joshis, honoured in South Mumbai, have been instrumental in transforming the lives of the blind by creating special softwares and libraries for them, finds Swati Soni
The Joshis, honoured in South Mumbai, have been instrumental in transforming the lives of the blind by creating special softwares and libraries for them, finds Swati Soni
SoBo was honoured to host Pune-based Meena and Raghunandan Joshi last week. The couple, who came to Mantralaya, were being felicitated by Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan for their contribution in helping blind students gain both literacy and knowledge.
The Joshis have been working with the visually-handicapped ever since the engineers started a firm that incorporated user-friendly features for the blind.The award is no first for the Joshis who have been involved with the setting up of softwares and libraries for the blind since the last two years.
So far, the Joshis have set up four Braille Mitra libraries a sightless person’s windows to the vast realms of English and regional literatures available to the sighted. While three of these are in Pune and one in Himachal Pradesh, Mumbai is yet to see one. These projects work on donations, smiles Raghunandan.
It is all started with a particular software the couple developed. While Shree Lipi was the existing software, the Joshis added Shree Lipi Braille. This was meant for translating text files of all major Indian languages into Braille. From the Shree Lipi software, we have now devised a new hardware unit. It is the coming together of both these that is helping us set up our libraries, informs Meena.
Today, any blind person can walk in and enjoy the library experience. All the books are electronic, indexed and stored in pen-drives. Library administration software, specially designed, allows the pen-drives to be loaded onto the special computer terminals. Once loaded, the indexed pen-drives allow the person to choose from the list of books.
These are then downloaded onto the terminal for reading via the Braille Mitra Reader. Thus, each reader can work independently without the need of a computer. It is compact, systematic and gives a sightless person virtually unlimited access, explains Meena.
We have now handed over the Shree Lipi Braille to the National Association For The Blind (NAB). Let them use it for the benefit of more students, say the Joshis who themselves have, over the years, transformed the lives of millions of blind people.
swatim.soni@timesgroup.com
swatim.soni@timesgroup.com
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE BLIND
An opening up of the treasure trove of literature.
Improving the literacy rate amongst visually-handicapped in all Indian languages.
Development and consolidation of futuristic technologies. For example, the commercialised Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems for Indian languages or the Text-To-Speech for Indian languages.
HOW BRAILLE MITRA READER WORKS
Soft Braille books (driven by a micro-computer) are formed by Braille characters in a row. Each character has six dots made by smooth plastic pins, which are raised selectively by electro-mechanical means to make a line. The feel of this line, to the sightless person’s index fingers is exactly same as that of feeling an embossed
Braille line. After the person reads a line, the next line appears automatically on the same place for ease reading.
Soft Braille books (driven by a micro-computer) are formed by Braille characters in a row. Each character has six dots made by smooth plastic pins, which are raised selectively by electro-mechanical means to make a line. The feel of this line, to the sightless person’s index fingers is exactly same as that of feeling an embossed
Braille line. After the person reads a line, the next line appears automatically on the same place for ease reading.