September 17, 2019
As part of her thesis project, Dr Nikisha Jariwala, a professor at a
Surat college for women has developed a model for blind and low students that
converts Hindi, English, and Gujarati text to Braille. The model is being
used by students at a local school for blind and low vision
students.
A labour of love for over four years for Dr Nikisha Jariwala
has finally borne fruit. This professor at the Smt.Tanuben and Dr
Manubhai Trivedi College of Information Science in Surat learned
Braille to develop a model that can convert Hindi, English, and Gujarat text
into Braille.
Dr Jariwala started working on the model four years ago as part of her thesis
project called “Design and Development of the model to transliterate
digitalised multilingual text into braille and speech – An aid for visually
impaired people”.
I wanted to do something that would be socially relevant and that led me to
choose this as a topic of research for my thesis. It took me
four-and-a-half years of working day and night to develop this to my
satisfaction. With this model, people who are blind and low vision can
communicate easily with everyone and study like everyone else on an equal
footing. – Professor Nikisha Jariwala, Developer
Dr Jariwala, who became a professor in 2009, went to great lengths to get it
right. A substantial amount of her time was spent in understanding and
learning Braille for starters and for this she relied on the
Ambabehen Maganlal Andhjan Shala, a school for blind and low
vision students in Surat. “The model”, she says, “has four parts”.
The first part of the model translates multilingual text into Braille. The
second part converts mathematical text like equations, etc into Braille. The
third part converts drawings and the fourth converts text to speech.
The aim is to enable students to pursue subjects like geometry and math that
tend to be inaccessible. “Currently students at a local school are using it
to transliterate many news articles and storing them in the library. This
means they are up to date with the news”.
Dr Jariwala’s university received a funding of ₹ 2 lakh from the
Gujarat Council on Science and Technology (GUJCOST) for the
project. “The model I have developed needs specific software and Braille
paper which is thicker as the characters need to be embossed”, says Dr
Jariwala.
Students using the model say it is helpful. “Now we don’t have to ask our
teachers to read out the newspaper headlines to us”, said a Class 8 student
of the Ambabehen Maganlal Andhjan Shala. “With the model, we
can read it ourselves”. School Principal Manisha Gajjar says
that thanks to the model, students are able to keep track of current affairs.
“The model converts everything relevant to their lessons into Braille, even
drawings, and there’s and text to speech. We see what is useful on the
Internet in the news section and print it out in Braille and students read it
in the library”.
Based on their feedback, Dr Jariwala says she will fine tune the model.
Regarding availability in the market, she says she will take a call after
some time.
Also Read: Inclusive Stem is out to make hands-on science
learning accessible to blind & low vision Indians
Source: https://newzhook.com/story/gujarat-professor-develops-model-to-convert-languages-to-braille
