Helping the visually impaired read Tamil

The Worth Digitisation project uses an advanced OCR software for Braille

January 31, 2015 12:00 am | Updated 05:33 am IST - CHENNAI:

Several blind students approach Worth Digitisation in Kottivakkam with requests to convert Tamil books to Braille —Photo: K.V. Srinivasan

Several blind students approach Worth Digitisation in Kottivakkam with requests to convert Tamil books to Braille —Photo: K.V. Srinivasan

When she proofreads books, B. Malarkodi knows she is opening up vistas she did not have access to in school or college.

The visually-impaired proofreader is part of a team at the Worth Digitisation centre in Kottivakkam that converts books to Braille.

What makes the not-for-profit organisation, a part of the Worth Trust group, all the more interesting is its ability to convert Tamil books to Braille. A not-so-simple task considering there is just a handful of optical character recognition (OCR) software available in the market. Most of them do not have a high accuracy level when it comes to identifying the Tamil script and converting it to digital format.

At Worth Trust, the workers, all of who are disabled in some way, use an OCR software developed at the medical intelligence and language engineering (MILE) lab of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru.

The OCR software, developed by a team headed by A.G. Ramakrishnan of the department of electrical engineering at IISc, is considered to be one of the best for Tamil, and has been provided free of cost to Worth Digitisation.

Several blind students approach Worth Digitisation for conversion of Tamil books to Braille. Most of these requests are for textbooks and other academic work.

The organisation charges students only the cost of the A3-sized paper on which the Braille embossing is done, at the rate of Rs. 6 per page.

Ms. Malarkodi handles the last part of a chain of work by the team. It starts with scanning the books, then using OCR to digitise the text, then converting the digitised text using software like Duxburry Braille Translator, and eventually embossing the books.

The project has been active from 2008, but awareness has grown only in recent times. With the help of MILE lab’s OCR software, the number of books being converted has also increased substantially.

They used to emboss 10 books a month some years back but today they are able to handle between 100 to 150 books a month.

Worth Digitising has also taken up converting popular Tamil magazines into Braille. Publications such as women’s magazine Mangayar Malar and children’s magazine Chutti Vikatan are being converted.

Malarkodi remembers the first Tamil book, outside of textbooks, she ever read in Braille. “It was Vairamuthu’s Thaneer Desam , and it was beautiful,” she says.

Visually-impaired students who would like to convert their books to Braille can contact Worth Digitising on 9442562321.

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