DHAKA: When school students in Bangladesh returned to their classes in January, those who are blind or visually impaired were left at a considerable disadvantage. Textbooks in Braille were months late in coming, leaving them without resources for their studies.

“Millions of normal (sighted) students got the taste of new books at the beginning of the school year. But we got them much later and also only ten books,” said Syeda Sanjida Alam, executive member of the Bangladesh Visually Impaired Society.

The fiasco, however, has provided a remarkable example of the internet’s power to foster innovation and action. A Bangladeshi living far away from his native land heard the news, and came up with a plan.

“I got very upset,” said Ragib Hasan, who teaches computer science at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, the United States. Anxious to do something to redress the situation, he launched an appeal via social media.

“First, I thought there wouldn’t be much of a response,” Hasan said, “but within an hour of posting my ideas on Facebook, several hundred fellow Bangladeshis offered to help.”

Their overwhelming response led to the creation of a Facebook group called “Banglabraille.” Some 2,000 volunteers began producing books for the visually impaired, including audiobooks.

Just two weeks after the work started, volunteers converted six books into audio versions. At the same time, editions of 11 books into Unicode—the universal computer industry standard—were completed and ready for conversion into Braille. Thirty additional books will soon be available on the group’s website –www.banglabraille.org.

“Initially, we had no idea about how to proceed as we never worked on this kind of project before,” technical director Ishtiaque Rouf told Khabar. “Then we decided to ask our volunteers to convert the non-Unicode versions available on the NCTB (National Curriculum and Textbook Board) website into Unicode versions.

“One group downloaded one page at a time from the website and then typed it before assembling the whole book,” he said.

Taking the lead

Bangladesh has routinely faced difficulties in providing textbooks to visually impaired. This year the situation was worse, due largely to a lack of funds and expertise. In 2013, the NCTB produced 104 books for primary and secondary level students. Of those, only ten books for ninth graders were converted into Braille.

Under its Education for All programme, the government is obligated to provide free Braille books-- as it does to primary and secondary level students. But printing in Braille costs much more than printing normal books. According to experts, a basic Braille printer costs over $80,000.

Education authorities say they are doing what they can to translate all books into Braille in the shortest possible time.

“Our goal is to convert all primary and secondary-level books into Braille and deliver them to the visually impaired students as soon as we can,” Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid told Khabar. “But it’s taking a bit time due to prohibitive costs.”

While volunteer efforts such as Hasan’s help to fill the gap, the NCTB acknowledges that it must do more to meet the obligation to serve all students. Improved technology could be part of the answer, experts say.

“Our initial efforts in producing the Braille books using new software have produced positive results,” said Akhter Hossain, a computer science professor at Daffodil University in Dhaka, who heads a research team on NCTB’s behalf.

Source: khabarsouthasia.com
BDST: 0953 HRS, AUG 27, 2013
SR/RS/BSK