– INDIAWEST Professor Ragib Hasan, assistant professor of Computer and Information Sciences and director of the UAB SECuRE and Trustworthy Computing Lab, won a Google RISE Award earlier this year for the Shikkhok Project, an education platform that provides free online courses to rural and
disadvantaged students in Bangladesh and India.Last month, Hasan read a news report from Bangladesh that many visually impaired children had not received textbooks six months into
the school year, despite a promise from government officials for new Braille textbooks.
Delays from book publishers and the expense of printing in Braille through the government’s single Braille printer have kept many of
Bangladesh’s visually impaired students from being issued textbooks, the report states.
In response, Hasan set up a Facebook group called BanglaBraille. He said he was not sure where to start, but figured out a system to have
volunteers type out the textbooks page-by-page and convert the textbooks in publishers’ proprietary formats into the unicode needed
to print them in Braille.
Within a few hours, Hasan’s group had more than 400 volunteers, according to UAB News. The project can be found online at
www.banglabraille.org. The ten dollars Hasan spent to set up the Web site has been his only expenditure thus far.
As volunteers continue to make textbooks printable in Braille, others are recording audiobook versions that can be distributed even faster.
Narrators have included everyone from students to famous TV actresses.
As of July 18, BanglaBraille has more than 20 textbooks digitized and 12 audiobooks with almost 60 hours of narration ready for
distribution. The Facebook group has 2500 volunteers. His next steps include plans to raise funds to print and distribute more Braille
textbooks, load audiobooks in cheap mp3 players and on memory cards that can be used in cell phones, and add audiobook versions of
literary works, as well as university-level textbooks.
“After starting this project, I have received letters from parents of visually impaired children,” Hasan told UAB News.
“One father wrote to me expressing his gratitude. His 13-year-old daughter is visually impaired from birth but is very talented.
Unfortunately, there are no schools for the visually impaired in their area, so his daughter cannot go to school. He thanked me for the
audiobook project, as he can now download the books into a mobile phone and play the textbook to his daughter. This shows how strong
crowdsourcing can be to create positive social change.”
