News

Volume 3 Issue 21 - November 01, 2005

Students with vision impairment break new ground with “Braille Face� software

D.N.I.S. News Network – Two students with vision impairment have created a software called, Braille Face, that promises to provide freedom to vision impaired students to answer their examination papers without the help of a writer.

This software recently developed by Gulzar Ahmed and Satvir Singh has the capacity to take any kind of Braille command, both in English and Hindi, and immediately translate it into print on screen.

Prepared primarily on Visual Basics, this software functions on six keys that denote Braille points, and when a visually impaired student presses any of these keys as in Braille writing, the word that appears on the screen will be in print and not in Braille. This makes it convenient for both the visually impaired examinees who can write in Braille and the sighted examiner who can correct the answers with ease.

The new software is said to have an edge over the existing Direct Lan Braille (D.L.B.) software, developed by engineers at Indian Institute of Technology (I.I.T.), Kharagpur due to its capacity to translate Braille point immediately into print on receipt of command, in comparison to the I.I.T. kit which can take up to thirty minutes. More important, this software can read any kind of number or word, whereas the D.L.B. can only read the recorded characters. While the D.L.B. needs support software, the new software functions independently.