To deliver regional literature to visually impaired people across India with a 'Kindle' like experience

India is home to a third of the world’s blind population. The country has about 12 million individuals with visual impairment as against the global total of 39 million according to a report published by the National Programme for Control of Blindness (NPCB). Despite this, when it comes to accessibility of education, healthcare and employment, the visually impaired are cut-off. Only 29.16 per cent of the blind in India are part of the education system as per a survey conducted by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). The same study points out that only 6.86 per cent of schools have access to braille and audio content. To empower the physically challenged, the Indian Government has set up an online braille and audio library as a part of Inclusivity in Education scheme using technology. An online catalogue of Braille books has been hosted by NIVH in collaboration with National Accessible Library. Also, several organisations like Blind People Association (India), Bengaluru based Samarthanam Trust have started cataloguing various books in audio and braille format. However, High cost of braille books, which are 30-50 per cent higher than others, are posing hurdles of publishing braille books. Besides, it’s not exactly convenient or portable. A Braille copy of the Bible can take up about 5 feet (1.5 meters) of shelf space. Significant observations from the above statistics are that majority of the catalogued books are in English and Hindi, there is a substantial lack of regional contents, and a significant gap is present between creating and delivering the value because of low availability of braille/audiobooks in Indian schools. The problem is more severe in rural than urban India. Besides ,there is one other angle to this challenge.

A research shows that UNESCO has encouraged mother tongue instruction in primary education since 1953 (UNESCO, 1953) and UNESCO highlights the advantages of mother tongue education right from the start, children are more likely to enrol and succeed in school (Kosonen, 2005). As children learn better in the mother tongue, the low availability of good regional braille/audio content might explain why only 29 per cent of the blind in India are part of the Indian Education System. Hence, the challenge of creating and delivering good online braille/audio regional content is one of the reasons why there is low inclusivity in education for visually impaired people in India despite various schemes of Indian Government to improve the infrastructure.

The challenge: To create a smooth application with online database with wide range of audio/braille format of the beautiful regional works of India which can become available to all parts of our country, be it rural or urban.

Metaphor: The metaphor of the challenge will be to create a Kindle-like easy and cheap experience for the blind in which they will be able to access a wide variety of regional contents in audio/braille format.

Potential Solution: The process of solving this challenge can be broken in two stages. First is to create audio/braille regional content, and second is to deliver the content efficiently in both urban and especially in rural areas. For the initial stage, the focus will be on creating and delivering audio content.

There are multiple regional trusts who are currently working on converting regional books into audio content. The platform that we will create can act as an aggregator to create a common database for all the regional contents. To deliver the content efficiently, a ipod like device can be designed, which will be of low cost also. The device will be connected to our database through cloud. We will integrate speech recognition engine for easy use by the visually impaired persons.The whole experience will be like “Kindle” where you can store or download the audio books from the vast library and listen to it.

1 day Low-cost experiment:

To gauge the interest of the potential customers, a low cost experiment will be conducted. The hypothesises that will be tested following –

• Hypothesis 1: There are not enough audio books in regional literature on the web and people, especially visually impaired people find it difficult to access the audio books in regional content.
• Hypothesis 2: Visually impaired people will not face problems while using the iPod like device with speech recognition platform.
• Hypothesis 3: People will be ready to generate contents for the audio library.

Experiment requirements :

10 People among them five will be visually impaired , Time – 1.5 hours, Experiment atmosphere – Workshop, 5 smart devices
Experiment Procedure :

• We will form a group of 10 people among which five will be visually impaired and from different regions of India
• Initially, there will be an open discussion between the stakeholders regarding regional contents and whether visually impaired people are finding it challenging to access regional literature.
• After the open discussion, every visually impaired person will tell what book they will like to read today, maybe a small chapter from their favourite regional literature.
• Then the other five persons will try to find the audiobook for the sections on the internet. If they find the audiobook, they will load it into smartphones. 
• If the content is not found, then the other five people will generate audio content for the remaining We will load the content in 5 smartphones.
• After that, we will give smartphones to the visually impaired people and ask them to use the speech recognition technology which is inbuilt nowadays in every smartphone, and listen to the content
• In the end, there will be again an open discussion about the chapters between all the ten people.

Cost of the experiment : 1.5 person-hours, workshop management cost

Testing of Hypothesis: 

• Hypothesis 1 – Hypothesis 1 will be tested while we ask them to find audiobooks on regional content on the internet.
• Hypothesis 2 -  While we are asking visually impaired people to use the smartphone using speech recognition technology, we can check how comfortable they are with the technology.
• Hypothesis 3 – We will be asking the other five people to create content for the visually impaired people, by that we can gauge their interest

Prototype:

The prototype will be an iPod like device which will be connected to the cloud based database consisting of regional literature in audio format. The device will completely run on speech recognition engine with one play/pause button and volume control button . A visually impaired person will have to give input as the regional literature name, the author name and the language. The device will run its search in cloud to provide the audio content. It will follow spotify/apple music model.

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