NFB: Striving to reach and serve the visually challenged

Blindness combined with poverty limits their access to education, employment, health services, which finally leads to their socio-economic exclusion.

Bengaluru: India is home to world’s largest visually impaired population with over 50 lakh people, according to the 2011 census and 2,50,000 blind persons in Karnataka. Most of the visually impaired people belong to the underprivileged sections of society. Blindness combined with poverty limits their access to education, employment, health services, which finally leads to their socio-economic exclusion.

Mattel releases first deck of Uno cards in Braille

GOODIN, Idaho — Middle schoolers at the Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind are getting their hands on the first official braille Uno deck.

"Games don't usually have braille on them unless you put it on, so I think putting braille on things like card games and Legos and stuff — that's a really good thing to do," seventh-grader Kathryn Reese said.

Some of played the game before, but with this deck, they didn't have to hand-braille the cards themselves.

This startup creates customised audio content through voice cloning

Founded in 2018, startup Deepsync Technologies uses AI to learn how you speak and saves hours of recordings, which then helps it to create audio content.

The time taken to produce an audiobook is a minimum of a month. In some cases, this can stretch up to two months. With the digital publishing and ebooks segment holding huge potential looking to the future, consider this – a technology that can reduce the time taken for an audiobook by 90 percent?

This tactile display lets visually impaired users feel on-screen 3D shapes

Using a computer and modern software can be a chore to begin with for the visually impaired, but fundamentally visual tasks like 3D design are even harder. This Stanford team is working on a way to display 3D information, like in a CAD or modeling program, using a “2.5D” display made up of pins that can be raised or lowered as sort of tactile pixels. Taxels!

First in North India: Chandigarh railway station set to become visually-impaired friendly

City’s railway station is set to become the first visually-impaired friendly railway station in North India and fourth in the country.

Bengaluru-based non-government organisation (NGO), Anuprayas, and Northern Railways are heading the project that will tentatively start from November 20 and will be completed within three months.

Under no circumstances will any vacancy for Divyangjan be filled by any other categories, says Railway Ministry

A day after the sit-in-protest at Delhi’s Mandi House by the persons with benchmark disabilities (PwBD) over alleged irregularities in railway recruitment exams, the Indian Railways on Monday assured that candidates would be appointed on merit.

The protests began over Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) Group D jobs in 2018. Several ‘Divyangjan’ (differently abled) students have been protesting since October 23 citing irregularities in the filling up of posts reserved for PwBD in the recent Level-1 recruitment exercise.

Stares of the Blind

Neglected Facet of Human Bonding.
The ways in which blind people connect to the art of seeing without the ocular equipment of the eyes are explored, recognising that seeing is as much a political act as it pertains to human bonding.

Education Dept to hold events for students

Tribune News Service
Jalandhar, October 28

The Education Department has been coming up with several interesting events to mark the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev.

What next to aid visually impaired?

The proliferation of standardised Braille opened up the world of knowledge for the visually impaired in 20th century, and now the Marrakesh Treaty — a global agreement to allow published materials in accessible formats to be exchanged freely across borders — is a significant step towards eradicating what is described as “the book famine” in the 21st century.