EYE-OPENER

Web sight: A new window to the world

A new content-sharing website has opened up a vista of reading material for the visually impaired

Joeanna Rebello Fernandes | TNN

Through his tapering school years, Moiz Tundawala studied via his brother. The brother would read out texts to him as Moiz—who started to show signs of Retinitis Pigmentosa in his teens and whose sight gradually declined—would commit the lessons to memory. Then Moiz decided to study law, and he had to look for another oral tradition. In 2004, he found JAWS (Job Access With Speech), a text-tospeech software that could read out pages of digital text. But scanning a half-ton textbook requires the patience of Job.

“There are limited institutionalised arrangements for the access of study material for the visually impaired,’’ complains

Moiz. “While NAB (National Association for the Blind) does a good job producing basic level texts and popular literature in Braille and audio books, it falls short when it comes to advanced academic material.’’

The problem of restricted access to reading material for the visually and print-impaired choruses across the developing world. The cataracts of the Indian government have denied this significant population—the 2001 census counted 13 million visually impaired (VI) people—the fundamental right to read. According to NAB, only 30 per cent of the VI go all the way to Standard X.

But corrective efforts are under way. Moiz recently stumbled upon an online social network and content-sharing platform called Bookbole—floated by an Indian social enterprise called Inclusive Planet in collaboration with the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). Bookbole is a clean site designed expressly for the VI, with Accessibility for iPhone and iPod touch—a blind user’s review—topping its ‘most viewed’ list.

The site aims to connect visually and print-impaired (including dyslexic) people around the world and gets them to share their digital archives of class notes, blogs, recipes, articles, audio magazines, theses, sound recordings and e-books. “In three months, Bookbole has managed a 10,000-strong archive with a global member base of 1,000,’’ says Bookbole’s active ally Soner Coban, a blind English Literature graduate from Bosphorus University in Turkey. “In other systems, you have to wait for the administrator to upload books, but BB users can upload what they want and request for what they’d like.’’

“We are trying to connect isolated users and their libraries and enable them to solve one another’s problems,’’ says Rahul Cherian from Chennai, one of the three cofounders of Inclusive Planet.

“A visually impaired person would have accumulated about 30-40 GB of reading material over time through his own efforts,” Cherian says. “By providing a platform for sharing some of this material we’re trying to minimise the duplication of effort.’’ Says Reuben Jacob, co-founder and IT brain of the project, “Not all electronic files are readable by text to speech software. But we have made sure that the semantics of the shared documents on this site are compatible with screen-reading software.’’

NAB has a Talking Books library with 5,000 titles on cassettes and CDs. The VI have to either borrow from the NAB centre itself or request a posted copy. Raman Shankar, project head of Talking Books, says that publishers permit the conversion of their books to audio format on condition that they are only circulated to the blind. While Bookbole currently stipulates that only VI persons join the club and requires new users to indicate this, it doesn’t ask for a sight certificate. “Being global is essential to the way Bookbole works,’’ insists Sachin Malhan, one of the co-founders of Inclusive Planet. “If we can’t connect similarly placed visually impaired in different parts of the world, then the value won’t be created.” It is unfeasible and impractical to create a body to screen the users across the world. Instead,if they receive a copyright-related complaint about a certain file or of misuse of the site, they will remove the content.

Currently the situation is that an overwhelming majority of publishers don’t make books available for the visually and printimpaired, and for the low-earning VI in India audio books are prohibitively priced as it is. So they have little recourse other than to scan or search for e-books on the internet, a move that automatically makes them culpable by myopic copyright laws.

This is why Inclusive Planet, along with non-profits like the CIS, The Daisy Forum of India and EnAble India, has also launched the Indian chapter of the World Blind Union’s Right to Read campaign. It has been pushing for a greater availability of books in accessible formats and an amendment of copyright laws. “We will present a white paper to the HRD ministry at the end of our sixcity Right to Read tour,’’ says Cherian.

SCREEN TIME: Bookbole allows the visually impaired to share notes, photos and even recipes

PRIMARY EDUCATION

EDUCATING Ammi and Abba

The Tanzeem-e-Walidaen works at enlightening Muslim parents as a prelude to schooling their children

Mohammed Wajihuddin | TNN

In an airy first-floor room at suburban Vikhroli, around a dozen middle-aged couples are listening attentively to a bespectacled man holding forth in chaste Urdu. Ibrahim Abedi talks passionately, his speech laced liberally with Quranic commands and couplets of the revered poet Allama Mohammad Iqbal. At the end, he hammers home a basic point: “Don’t let your children go astray. Hand them over to our custody.

No, this isn’t a dharma guru’s discourse to his devoted disciples on parental care. Rather, it’s an adult education class with a difference—one which parents of poor Muslim students attend to equip themselves to deal with the vicissitudes of their first-generation-learner children’s academic lives. Conducted by the Tanzeem-e-Walidaen (Parents’ Association), a group which reaches out to needy children through their parents, its unusual inasmuch as methods go: while many NGOs work directly with disadvantaged children to keep them in class, the Tanzeem first drills some discipline into parents through motivational talks and counselling by clinical psychologists.

“There’s no point spending time and energy on kids whose parents are not motivated,’’ says Abedi, Tanzeem-e-Walidaen’s general secretary. “Since 1997, we have guided over 15,000 students. Around 75% of them have cleared the SSC exams. That means we have substantially checked the drop-out rate among the targeted group.’’

Since the Tanzeem confines its work to parents who send their wards to municipal schools, its volunteers scour civic schools in minority pockets like Bhendi Bazaar, Kurla, Govandi, Mumbra and Bhiwandi. Once the back-benchers are identified, the organisation approaches parents. Why municipal schools? Apart from the concern about poor kids dropping out and “swelling the number of unemployable and unemployed angry youth’’, there’s another reason: a municipal rule says that no child till the fourth grade will be failed, and by the time the children reach fifth grade, many of them are hopelessly unfit to be in higher grades. It is here that the Tanzeem intervenes.

The parents are first told why they need to enroll their kids in special classes conducted by the Tanzeem’s teachers. They are also told that poverty should not be an excuse to take their kids out of school. A few sessions later, parents learn that their seemingly dull kids too could excel if guided properly. Examples of successful people, who also had humble beginnings, are given. Parents are free to voice their doubts and inhibitions, if any. “At our initial meetings, we heard parents complain against teachers who failed their children,” says Ali M Shamsi, the Tanzeem’s president. “We asked the parents to evaluate their own conduct.’’

As a pilot project, the Tanzeem “raided’’ the slums of Kurla, held meetings with the parents and adopted over 200 children, incubating them for five months. “As the word spread, people started coming to us with requests to coach their children beyond the fifth grade as well,” says Sheikh Abdullah, president of the Tanzeem’s Kurla unit. “We didn’t do that but guided them to other organisations which helped them financially.’’

The result has been overwhelming. Kids who didn’t know the three Rs even in the fifth standard are showing rapid progress. “My daughter didn’t even know how to write her name when we brought her here. Now she is in college,’’ says Qamruddin Khan, a factory worker. “My other four kids were also coached and are doing well academically.

Most of the parents are poor— tailors, taxi drivers, labourers at construction sites and factory workers. “I probably wouldn’t have sent my three daughters to college had these people not convinced me. They guided me and my children at the right time,’’ says a visibly obliged Ansar Patel, a BEST employee and father of three. Patel’s elder daughter Sajeda, now a third-year BA student, recalls: “I was very inhibited and couldn’t even go out alone. Their training equipped me with the confidence to do my things on my own.’’

BACK TO SCHOOL Poverty is not an excuse to deny your kids education, parents are told

Soon, the biggest thing since www

The Grid Coming To A Computer Near You

Shobhan Saxena | TNN

CERN (Geneva): With domain names in Hindi, Arabic and Chinese set to become a reality on the web, the pundits in this science hub of Switzerland, where the internet was arguably invented, claim the next giant leap towards internationalisation will be the grid, which is just weeks away from powering up. The grid, made of thousands of desktops, laptops, supercomputers, data vaults, mobile phones, meteorological sensors and telescopes, will start work when proton beams collide in the world’s biggest experiment ever inside a deep tunnel here on the French-Swiss border.

It is a revolution, say scientists of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) because it uses the internet but is not the internet. Using cloud computing, the grid will combine the computing resources of more than 100,000 processors from more than 170 sites in 34 countries and will be accessible to thousands of physicists globally. The scientists claim it will change the way the information superhighway works.

Small computer grids similar to power grids have been in operation for some time, but CERN’s will be the biggest one of them all and will become a reality when its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) becomes operational this month.

Maarten Litmaath, the Dutch physicist who heads CERN’s computing centre, told TOI, “When it begins operation, the LHC will produce roughly 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes or equivalent to storage capacity of 20 million CDs) of data annually which thousands of scientists around the world will access and analyze.”

Grid: The Future of Science
The Web just shares info on computers, the Grid also shares computing power and data storage capacity Scientists can log on anywhere in the world, processing on machines across the planet CERN needs the Grid to store 15 pentabytes — equivalent to a 20-km high stack of CDs Grid computing can help drug discovery by speeding up the computer-based screening and testing process

Grid to be ‘global computer’
Our grid will make it possible for scientists around the world to access this data real time.’’ Till now, a giant grid was considered something of a pipe dream, says Litmaath. Its implications, he says, are enormous. “Imagine several million computers from all over the world, and owned by thousands of different people. And imagine if these PCs, workstations, servers and storage elements can all be connected to form a single, huge and super-powerful computer. This sprawling, global computer is what the grid will be.’’

CERN says it is only right and proper that the giant grid be developed in the place where the world wide web was invented.

Although there are several claimants to the internet’s authorship, it was here that British software whiz Tim Berners-Lee and other scientists set the stage for the internet explosion in 1990. At the time, Berners-Lee’s boss at CERN offered the measured response—“vague but impressive’’—to the scientists’ proposed system that would allow scientists around the world to swap information on research.

It was in that proposal, written in a small room in a CERN building, that the terms “http’’ (global hypertext language) appeared for the first time. A small placard saying ‘The web was invented here’ still hangs on the door of the room where Berners-Lee and the other scientists developed the first blueprint of the internet.

The web changed the world forever and now CERN expects great results from grid computing, which, Litmaath says, will power science around the globe—scientists can share data, data storage space, computing power, and results. Together, researchers can tackle bigger questions than ever before: from disease cures and disaster management to global warming and the mysteries of the universe.

CERN already has at least three centres in India with which it shares data and expertise on a regular basis, something that can only grow exponentially.

In ’06, a test grid analysed 300,000 avian flu drug components