This Brilliant Project Is Making Education Accessible To India’s Visually Impaired.

Have you ever browsed the internet, our most basic need today, while being blindfolded? You would ask, what’s even the use of that? You might think that for a visually impaired person, the crucible of information that is the internet, is too far away from grasp.

Most of the information we consume is based on visual cues. From signboards on the roads to captcha filling on the internet, the world is set around a majority of people who are fully abled.
 

Wanting to make the path easier for the visually impaired (VI) people is the non-profit initiative, Hear2Read, which uses Text to Speech (TTS) software that processes visual content into audio.

The man behind this empowering initiate is Suresh Bazaj, an entrepreneur who has been working in the telecom industry since 1973 in the USA. The Better India spoke with Suresh to understand the current scenario of visually impaired students in India and how the app is helping such students.

“It’s not that every visually impaired student is exceptional, but they have the same distribution of smart, intelligent people. The problem is that these students couldn’t afford the education that normal people got, because they have to buy braille books which are expensive for many poverty-stricken people,” says Suresh.
 

And Suresh is right. Only about 10% of blind children in India get any type of formal education. The rest are either too poor or do not have the means to get access to their type of education.

Suresh describes the purpose of the Hear2Read software, saying “The Text-To-Speech software we have developed is a long journey to achieve the goal of bringing quality education to visually impaired people.”

The goal, along with the initiative, was born in 2013 when he had quit his job. Suresh had suffered retinal detachment– which is a disorder in the eye, leading to poor vision and was just regaining his sight.
Source: https://www.thebetterindia.com/150868/android-app-education-accessible-indias-visually-impaired-suresh-bazaj/