Kozhikode: The local version of digital talking books, with the moniker DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System), has been as splendid as the flower for visually impaired people, who savor the world of knowledge with ease of access.
Launched by Kerala Federation of Blind Youth Forum in collaboration with State Youth Welfare Board, Daisy addresses the lack of online speech engine for reading Malayalam text.
It was launched in 2014 with the Youth Board’s funding. The audio programme enables the visually impaired to listen to Malayalam literary works/periodicals by using CD or via online/mobile phone.
“Those who do not have computer access the audio text using DVD. For fine audio quality there are tools like AMIS to be used on computer; ‘Daisy to go’ app on Nokia phones and ‘Daisy player’ on android platform,” said Blind Forum joint secretary Anilkumar P.
The downloading of the programme from http://daisy.kfbyf.org is free of cost. “As we found that a single person cannot contribute much, we thought of voice donation. That became a huge hit. Many persons, including expats, are uploading the audio record of the literary works they read,” he said.
Available in the library are works of Vaikom Mohammad Basheer, O.V Vijayan and M.T Vasudevan Nair.
K.R Meera’s latest novel, ‘Aarachar’ is another audio treat. Uploaded materials of donors are edited by visually challenged editors, who convert them into Daisy format. Recently, a whatsapp group of donor readers was formed.
"I had read around 50 literary books using DAISY, including 'Pranayalekhanam' and 'Neermathalam Poothakalam'. It has been a wonderful experience, far better than normal audio CDs," beams Anish Oommen, a visually impaired youth in Thiruvananthapuram.
Mr Sudheer. M, teacher at Veembur government UPS in Malappuram, says he read school textbooks through Daisy. According to Mr Sharafudeen T, Daisy makes comprehending text much easy. It's easy to flip pages using the navigation facility.
“The uniqueness of the programme is the navigation accessibility. Any reader can jump from one page to another and control the reading speed,” elaborated Blind Forum president C. Sajeevan.
Apart from literary works, academic books for visually challenged students are also available on the website.
