National Association for the Blind (NAB-Karnataka) has offered to be a facilitator in the quest of several IT companies to make their technology products accessible to the blind.

Speaking at a seminar on accessible technology (for the blind) - called VITAL 2008 - NAB's governing body member H Ramakrishna told representatives of IT companies present on the occasion that the training institution has a vast network within the state and across the country.

“This extensive network, which also covers blind persons in the rural areas, would be a good testing ground for companies,” Mr Ramakrishna said. “By reaching out to the blind through the network, the companies can precisely understand how existing technologies can be fine-tuned to suit the needs of the visually challenged population in this country.”

Though advancement of technology has helped a few visually challenged persons to find employment and improve their quality of life, Mr Ramakrishna pointed out that high cost and barriers like language have restricted the reach of technology to all visually challenged persons in the state and across the country.  NAB’s President Dr Saroja Ramachandra said the seminar is the first attempt by an NGO in the state to initiate cooperation with IT companies in order to make technology available for the blind.

Conceived as a deliberative cum demonstrative event, the seminar had about seven papers from various corporate and academic institutions working on software, voice recognition and mobile technology spheres.
While presentations such as the one by Ajay Gupta, Director, HP Labs, focussed on ways of modifying available technology such as touch, camera and GPS technology to support the blind, others like Prof A G Ramakrishnan, Associate Professor, IISc, showed the delegates Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software developed by the institution to read Tamil and Kannada books.

“We have also developed a stand-alone TTS (Text-To-Speech) engine in Kannada and Tamil, which can be integrated with systems already using screen readers,” said Prof Ramakrishnan.

“If these technologies are further improved, these will help the blind access printed text and read electronic documents without having to spend much.”

The seminar also had its focus around GPS (Global Positioning System) and how it can help the blind in navigation and location detection.