Organisation: Beyond Sight Foundation
Country : INDIA
Website : www.blindwithcamera.org
Language: English, Hindi
Email: partho@blindwithcamera.org
Since 2006, the Beyond Sight Foundation under its Blind With Camera project has trained over 500 visually impaired persons in photography across India, 30% of whom continue to take pictures independently. Five visually impaired trainees have turned as trainers and they teach photography to other visually impaired and are paid for their services. The foundation started www.bindwithcameraschool.org e-school of photography to help the visually impaired get started with photography by using step-by-step tutorials. The website also offers guidance to sighted photographers to conduct photography workshops with local visually impaired. The e-school is aimed to create a global community where people with visual impairment can learn, enjoy the art of photography and inspire change in society through photography. Pictures coming out of the Blind With Camera project are showcased through inclusively designed exhibitions in India and abroad. Along with normal photographs, the exhibition offer touch & feel raised pictures, Braille, Large Print, and Audio Description (AD) for visually impaired visitors to access and enjoy the photographs. Since the first public show in February 2007, photographs have reached out to over 50,000 sighted and 2000 visually impaired audience. The foundation also conducts “Blindfold Sensory Photo” workshops for the sighted people, where trained visually impaired photographers are instructors/trainers and they are paid for their services. Blind With Camera is being referred to in several research papers, academic blogs and conferences across world. The project has helped researchers to develop mobile apps to help the visually impaired to take pictures.
Organisation: MILE Laboratory Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of Science,
Country : India
Website : mile.ee.iisc.ernet.in/mile
Language: Tamil and Kannada
Email: ramkiag@ee.iisc.ernet.in
In January 2011, the Medical Intelligence and Language Engineering (MILE) Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science developed a versatile software for rapid and efficient conversion of printed books to Braille books for the use of persons with visual disability under a project called “Gift of New Abilities”. This user friendly tool using compatible plug-in OCRs for any language has been developed in Java using Eclipse SWT and runs on Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems. At present, OCR plug-ins have been developed for Tamil and Kannada languages. The average time taken for digitizing a page is two seconds. So far, more than 500 Tamil books (school, college, story and general) have been converted by MILE’s OCR and delivered as Braille books to hundreds of blind students in Tamil Nadu. Our OCR has been installed free of charge in several computers of RCMCT Worth Trust Rehabilitation Centre, Chennai and they have been running it as a service for blind students for the past 4 years. Worth Trust uses the OCR to recognize and convert printed text to Unicode first and then to Braille code and prints them on a Braille printer and gives the Braille book to the requesting blind person. They have also digitized Tamil books for the same cause on behalf of https://www.bookshare.org/. MILE has also given the tool to many other similar organizations in Tamil Nadu. Similarly, the Kannada version has been given to some voluntary agencies and individual blind students in Karnataka.
Organisation: University of Colombo School of Computing
Country : Sri Lanka
Website : www.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk
Language:English, Sinhala
Email: klj@ucsc.cmb.ac.lk
Organisation:Kriyate Design Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Country : India
Website : www.kriyate.com
Language: English
Email: arjun@kriyate.com
Organisation:Talk – An Innovative AAC Device for People with Developmental Disabilities
Country : India
Website : N/A
Language: English
Email: dilbagi.arsh@gmail.com