Bengaluru :
Sridhar S (22), a visually challenged degree student from Shivamogga, was good at academics. But he couldn’t study for his final-year BA or take the exam simply because no textbooks were available in Braille.
As books were part of old literature, they were not available in digital version either. His father Srinath would read out from the printed textbooks whenever he had time. But that didn’t help Sridhar much as he found it tough to memorize and recall the portions.
Now, an innovation by Shiva Kumar HR, a student at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), has made life easier for the likes of Sridhar. Shiva’s innovation helps scan printed books and instantly makes them text compliant for the visually challenged.
Shiva has deservedly bagged the Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Award for 2015.
The young scientist, who is pursuing his PhD under the guidance of Prof AG Ramakrishnan at the Medical Intelligence and Language Engineering (MILE) Laboratory, department of electrical engineering, IISc, has developed high-accuracy optical character recognizers (OCR) for Kannada and Tamil languages. This converts scanned pages of a printed documentbook into e-text.
By using the OCR along with the Printto-Braille tool, it is easy to scan any printed bookdocument and convert it into Unicode text in a short span of time.The visually challenged person can listen to that e-text through any text to speech (TTS) synthesis software. The etext can also be converted into Braille codes and printed using a Braille embosser. Shiva said the study substance for English and European languages were available in digital and Braille versions for visually challenged. “But not so with Indic languages (classical literature, novels and even school and college books). Here, much of the printed material e-text is not available and hence inaccessible to visually challenged. Converting books into Unicode text by manual typing takes time and is costly,” he added.
It reduces time, cost
Shiva said the high-accuracy OCR cuts down on time and cost. “We have demonstrated it already and found it is possible to convert more books in a short span of time and make them accessible to the visually challenged. The Worth Trust in Chennai has opened a facility using our product.Family members or friends of visually challenged students come and get digitalized or Braille versions of printed textbooks in minutes. The number of the visually challenged in India is over 18 million and the product goes a long way in helping them,” he added.
Applications aplenty
Shiva and team have also developed an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) called Print-to-Braille tool that enables even non technical people to quickly use their OCR and make corrections to the mistakes, if any, in the text output by the OCR. Hundreds of Tamil books, including textbooks, story and general books, have been converted into Braille format, and distributed to the needy.A Kannada version of the software has been given to some voluntary organizations and individuals in Karnataka associated with visually challenged students. Apart from pursuing PhD, Shiva is a software engineer at IBM Software Labs.
Awarded for its social relevance
The award to Shiva has been given by the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (SRISTI) and aims to recognize student projects that have social relevance. Shiva’s work, Gift of New Abilities, was chosen for the award in the Computer Science, Information Technology and Related Fields category. The award was given at a function at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi on March 8.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Bengaluru / TNN / March 12th, 2015