The campus of the Helen Keller Memorial Association For The Blind is abuzz. The carpets on the floor and the shamiana lend it a festive mood. Students dressed in their best walk around and there is a barely contained excitement in the air. The reason for this? An audiobooks and Braille library that has just recently been launched.
The library brings hope with it as for the past 10 years the students have been making do with academic books provided to them at the school. The new library will change all that as it has 100 paperback Braille books and many audiobooks across genres.
Winds of change
What is even more wonderful is that the library offers its services to those outside the educational institution too and all free of cost.
Bhima Rao, president of the Helen Keller Memorial Association says, “The school (that has classes from one to 10) and hostel over 100 students. Many of them go on to other universities for further studies. Keeping this in mind, the library has mostly educational and general knowledge books. However, it also has storybooks and lifestyle magazines.”
While the paperback books have to be read in the library, the audiobooks can be copied on CDs or memory cards, making the books more accessible.
The library is a joint effort of the school, Amway India and a Bengaluru-based organisation, Samarthanam that works for people with special needs.
Learning with technology
“The audiobooks hold many advantages over paperbacks. Translating one page of normal text would occupy two-three pages in Braille. This makes the books heavier and difficult to carry around. The audio books can also serve more people at a time while a paperback can be used only by one person at a time. But one can’t deny the advantage of reading books when it comes to learning the language and mastering it,” ” says Buse Gowda, trustee of Samarthanam.
Samarthanam will also entertain requests from students for converting other paperback books into audiobooks. “We have over 400 volunteers in different centres who convert paperback books into audiobooks,” he adds. The institute also has three Braille printing machines that print academic texts. And only when time permits are non academic onesprinted.
Assistive technology
Over the past decade, assistive technology for visually challenged has evolved in leaps and bounds . Reading PDFs, Job Access With Speech (JAWS), DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) and Nonvisual Desktop Access (NVDA) are making their interaction with technology easier.
It was not so always. Rao recollects that in the 1990s the school did have an audio library where books were recorded on cassettes. While the library housed more than 5,000 cassettes, it became increasingly difficult to store and maintain them and once they wore out the cassettes were unusable.
“We also had the problem of people borrowing and not returning the cassettes. And students back then had to buy a tape recorder especially for this. But with the current technology there won’t be such issues.”
