Digital talking book for visually impaired

The one-day South India-level seminar on DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) production will be held at the Century Club in Bangalore on November 05, 2008. The Primary and Secondary Minister of Karnataka Vishweshwara Hegde Kageri will preside as the inaugural guest. Other guests who will be part of the event include Ashwath IAS, Secretary, department of women and child welfare, Selvakumar IAS, Director, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, BN Vijayakumar, MLA, Jayanagar, and Mahantesh, founder-managing trustee, Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled. 

The seminar is being jointly organized by the DAISY Forum of India, Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled, Sonata Software Limited, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, and the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped. It aims to promote DAISY technology and production as a tool to enable visually challenged individuals to read books with ease.

A DAISY book is a digital talking book designed to allow the visually challenged readers to navigate through it like a sighted person.

The seminar will be attended by representatives from 50 NGOs working towards the cause of empowering the visually challenged from Karnataka, Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, representatives from the government as well as the corporate sector.

During the seminar, the participants will be introduced to the new DAISY technology and the techniques involved in its production.

S Ganesh Prasad, Director, Systems and Processes, Samarthanam, will speak on the collaborative efforts of Samarthanam with DAISY.
Samarthanam

Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled, set up in 1997 by three visually impaired graduates, has been rendering various services to the visually and physically challenged for the last 11 years.  Samarthanam provides food and shelter to 200 visually and physically challenged individuals as well as to people from the economically weaker sections of the society.

Through its ‘Vidya Prasad’ scheme, Samarthanam provides food to 35,000 children across 150 schools. Apart from this, it also provides education and training to 453 children. With the aim of empowering visually challenged students with knowledge and technology, Samarthanam provides IT and English education as well as career-oriented coaching to them through its ‘Techvision’ project.

Sonata
Sonata Software, headquartered in Bangalore, India, is a leading IT consulting and services company. Sonata’s customers are located across the US, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Its portfolio of services includes Business Intelligence, Packaged Applications, Product Engineering Services, Application Development, Application Management, IT Consulting Managed Testing, and Infrastructure Management. As per the industry rankings released by NASSCOM for FY07-08, Sonata Software ranked among the Top 20 IT Software and Service Exporters in India.