“That’s why it’s absolutely imperative to produce such books for such people so that they can use it to further progress in their education,” adds Prasain.[break]
Four years ago, Bijay started making audio-books for the visually-impaired after seeing the plight of his younger sister’s friend who was struggling with her studies after SLC.
“At that time, it was my solo project, but slowly I told my friends and they also got involved and by now we’ve recorded and distributed quite a number of textbooks,” he explains.
Though it has only been about a month since Prasain joined up with Dewan on the project, the impact he has had has been great.
“We’ve been using social networking sites like Facebook to recruit more volunteers, without whom this project can’t be accomplished,” says Prasain.
According to him, right now there are about 80 volunteers working on a book each. An average textbook of 200-300 pages to be turned into an audio-book takes about 15-20 days with about two hours of work each day.
The recording is done at home, and later edited by the team. They also have certain guidelines to read out the texts so that those who are using it don’t get confused.
Mind you, this is a strictly non-profit project. The volunteers are given essential training on the guidelines and how to use the software.
The software and books are provided by the team with microphones, if necessary. After completion, the audio-books are distributed to the visually-impaired through CDs.
“In the future, we plan to distribute it through MP3 players, which we’ll provide to colleges and they will circulate them to their visually-impaired students. And the students can return the players after they complete their studies,” iterates Prasain.
Since there were virtually no Braille books for visually-impaired students at +2 and higher standards, they can take full advantage through this project.
“Those, to whom we’ve given the audio-books, were either failing or not doing particularly well in their exams before. But now, they are all passing their exams and performing nicely as well,” articulates Dewan.
There are certain challenges that the project faces, like copyright issues, so the team cannot put the books on Internet for free, as not only visually impaired but other people may also use them. Also, people who use the audio-books have a different opinion on the same book.
“Some find an audio-book reading too slow, while others find the same audio-book too fast. That’s why we try to keep it at a consistent level and ask samples from our volunteers so we can give them tips to improve,” states Prasain.
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