Fund crunch hits plan for visually challenged

Thiruvananthapuram: Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY), a revolutionary project undertaken by the Federation of Blind has been allegedly shunned for a year due to shortage of funds.

The voice donation programme initiated to read books for blind people could not be implemented effectively due to shortage of staff in the office especially editorial staff. Initially the funds were provided by Kerala Youth Welfare Board.

But the funding was stopped after the board was dissolved. Faced with shortage of funds and staff, the federation had invited people to donate voice for enriching their voice bank. Though there was good response, without editorial support these donations cannot be converted into usable format.

“We cannot stop the project midway as it has remarkable success. Hundreds of people with visual impairment depend on the programme. So we are spending money from our own pocket. This project is a charity work,” Anil Kumar,

Secretary, Federation of Blind.  Though they approached corporation several times, there has been no positive response. Now they want the government step in.

“Books of all genres are available now. I mostly read general knowledge books. DAISY has made reading easy for me. The unique feature of this software is that we can easily navigate from one page to another and even from sentence to sentence, bookmark a page, read a particular page, etc,” claimed Shaju, a regular user of the software. This can be used for illiterate and physically challenged people too.

“We regularly read text books for Malayalam medium state syllabus students from one to tenth, as well as teacher’s handbook. They are primarily recorded as mp3 and then converted to DAISY later”, Shinju, the only staff reader in the studio said. It is in the audio studio of Blind People’s Federation Office that these recordings are carried out. These books are then freely distributed to the students of 14 blind school and blind teachers.