i'd like to welcome all of you to this session,which is entitled towards an accessible internet for people with disabilities. the format ofthis particular workshop is as follows. we have four panelists with us today. the firstis gunela astbrink, who is one of the organizers of this workshop. she is in australia andshe is trying to connect from there. as you can see, we have been having a little bitof problems in getting her connected. so we are hoping that she will be able tocome in. in fact, she wanted to speak first, becauseshe was kind of introducing the topic as a person who has been working for long withpeople with disabilities. the other speakers that are here with me todayarun, dipendra, and sunil who will be speaking
to us on various aspects of working with peoplewith disabilities, in the context of an accessible internet.so we will first see if gunela can join us, and make her statement in about five to eightminutes. if she is unable to join we will continue with the panel here.so gunela, are you able to hear us? can you start?(echo) >> gunela astbrink: okay. i will start.and i'm just wondering if my slides can be loaded, please. is that possible?in case they can't be, and in the interest of time, i will start my presentation. andhopefully they can be loaded as we go along. so thank you very much. and it's a real shamei can't be there in person. i was sincerely
hoping to, but i'm delighted to be presentingat this aprigf. am i -- i'm hoping that i'm on. oh, great.i think... anyway, while this is uploading, i'm assumingthat you can hear me. yes, you can hear me fine.in the background i'll see that i have something from papua new guinea. anyway, this workshopcame back after last year's aprigf. the topic was covered at the international igf but itmay not be at the regional level. and so satish and i are talked about organising this workshop.and i heard with interest at the opening address about the internet. we are seeing the futurein villages throughout india and it's really exciting and the thing is an equitable internet.so certainly accessibility and disability
are key components of an equitable internet.so when we talk about disability, we need to be clear on what we need. we're talkingabout people with blindness and hearing loss and we will be hearing about that from dipendra.and people with hearing loss and we will be hearing from arun about deaf-blind issues:and then of course people with physical disability. this is a key area for people with disabilities.and we often think about it from the point of view of vision loss and hearing loss andphysical disability. but intellectual disability needs to be taken into account here and thereare particular issues when it comes to the use of the internet and the benefit of theinternet for people with all of these different disabilities.and when we look at the statistics of disabilities,
according to the world health organisation,2010 in their report, they are talking about 1 billion people.(audio fading in and out) 80 percent (inaudible)now, we look at disability in different ways. the mod kal model, i'm sure there is a lotthat can be done medically. the first thing is (inaudible) and the other one is the socialmodel, which means the community has to (audio fading in and out) (inaudible) is something that really is fixedin this process. an example is programmes for users. and the benefit for (audio fadingin and out) now an electronic programme, there are thingslike accessible websites and net and we are
hearing about that. hardware and software,mobile phones can be designed in a way so that they are accessible right from the startand be accessible here. and we must not forget the role of technologies, where there areno solutions that might meet the needs. so let's look at this. the united nationsconvention on the rights of persons with disabilities, it's been signed and ratified by over 100countries and a large number of those happen to be in the asia-pacific region. now, thereare a lot of different publications, and one of them which is very relevant here is implementingthis to design, develop, produce and distribute accessible ict at on easterly yes stage, sothese become accessible at minimum cost for people with disabilities. and we look at thisand this accounts for the market.
and another promising area, the internet isfor everyone. now, everyone should really meed everyone. the policy paper, which i wasprivileged to draft, called the internet fews by persons with disabilities cover a lot oftopics for disability and everyone being involved in improving accessibility to the internet.and most reseently, netmundial had a landmark meeting. they produced the met mun dial multi-stakeholderstatement of sao paulo and there were a lot of very important supports from governments.and one of those related to accessibility much and it states "accessibility: personswith disabilities should enjoy full access to online resources. promote the design, development,production and distribution of accessible information technologies and systems on theinternet."
so we have these simple statements comingout that relates to internet governance. so that really is a very, very brief overview.(echoing) i probably would have gone into a little bitmore detail, but because of the time factor, i look forward to participating in the paneland hearing the other speakers. thank you very much. >> satish babu: can we have the audio backto the original? (no audio) >> arun mehta: is between the cracks. a lotof technology has been developed for persons with blindness, for persons with motor disabilities,but if you have multiple disabilities then
there is surprisingly little. and so we have tried -- decided to focus on this. ionly mention this, we have done a lot of work relating to persons with cognitive disabilitiesand at previous meetings of the internet governance forum i've had the privilege of talking aboutthat. but if you go to our website, skid.org.in -- you're not able to find my slides? i haveit on stick. it's uploading. okay. so we basically have set up a platform whereit's very easy to develop fresh software based on individual requirements. you see, we believethat engineers sometimes need to work the way doctors do. that you're dealing with peopleone at a time, not that you develop a piece
of software and expect a million people tobe able to use it. so we created a platform where this was easy to do, where we couldeasily train students to do the same and that's how we're able to do free software in a countrywith very little support, because students work for us in summer vacations free.what i would like to talk about here is about the work that we are doing with the deaf-blind.this is something that emanated from the dynamic coalition on accessibility and disabilityat the internet governance forum where we started to ask ourselves who are the peoplewho are not here? you know. we have deaf people as part of our dcad. blind people like dipendrahave been very active contributors. wheelchair based people like chadi have been active butmultiple disabilities we didn't see. fernando
and i had a discussion, a blind person frombrazil, that the deaf-blind can be reached through the vibrate on the phone and i'vegot a student who started working on it. and we soon had software which used morse codeon the vibrate to communicate. but there wasn't a single deaf-blind person who was ready tostart using it. so we really needed to look at the problem a lot better, and so we werevery fortunate in getting support from the isifd, information society innovation fund,which is administered by apnic, and they are very, very agile and flexible when it comesto small sums of money. very often an ngo like ours needs a small amount of money. soif you want a large amount of money there are plenty of funders you can go to. but ifyou want a small amount of money you have
to go through the same rigmarole with themand it's not worth it. so this is designed for people like us, who are happy in the workthat they do. but sims they have a project that needs a lot more work than they anticipatedand the deaf-blind was something like that. we can develop software. what we cannot dogo is go into the deaf-blind community and do workshops and that takes a lot of moneyand evrlt and we were very happy for this help.now, what also made it -- if you can go to the -- i think we have gone too far on theslides. just go back a little please. i've been writing softwarefor many decades now. it's amazing how simple it has become to write simple apps. and iwould like to simply demonstrate this. now,
we have actually, as part of the grant, thework that we have done, we have developed two apps. both are available on google play.the first one that i will talk about is something on my phone. this is designed for people,old people basically, who have low vision and are deaf. this is among old people, sadly.so this is an app which basically... well, basically, what you have to do is you rotatethe phone -- hello? what is your name?can you read from wherever you are? so even a person with low vision can use this to communicate.and this -- i've been using this in english. you can also use this in hindi.now, if you can just go to the next slide, please.you don't have the grachx, but just the text.
i'm sorry, you don't have the graphics. buton this graphic what you were supposed to be seeing is the source code for this appthat i just showed you. and it's just like if you're doing lego. it's like sticking fouror five bricks together. so this is a very very simple app. it gets written in less thanfive minutes. and what it is doing, it's doing sophisticated speech recognition and everything.but you as a programmer don't have to know how to do it. there are modules, like legobricks that you plug in and you can start making your app.i'm glad that you were able to demonstrate this to you on the phone and maybe i can showyou the source code, if you wish you can talk to me later. can we go to the next slide,please? now the latest app that we have done,
what we have discovered, sadly, is that hardlyany deaf-blind person in this country learns abcd. to get to a point where you get basicliteracy is huge for a deaf-blind perpendicular. so what we, you know, what -- deaf-blind person,for example, struggle with basic concepts, such as mom and dad. i mean, imagine thatthe teachers have to spend a lot of explaining to the child what is mom, what is dad, andwhat the difference is. learning how to read time and to tell timetakes a long time and things like that. so our focus has been now, on writing appsthat would work for preliterate persons, persons who have not yet learned how to read and write.and so the best place to start is with children. and when you're working with children, thenatural thing when it comes to communication
is a slate. now, the normal slate that allof us grew up with is not accessible to a person who is blind. so the software thatwe wrote lets you draw with your finger and you can sense what you have drawn by vibration.i'll just -- i can just quickly show that to you. but the vibration is something sadlythat i capital show you. but let me just try. when you just run your finger over it, youcan sense what you have drawn with your finger and the vibrate even if you are a deaf andblind perpendicular. now this has just gone up on to the app store n just a few days ago.in the course of this week we will be doing workshops at the helen keller institute forthe deaf and deaf/blind, with deaf-blind people, to see how well solutions like this work.so what i wanted to do -- okay. go to the
next slide, please. we have a screen shotthat you can't see but i've shown you the thing here live. so move to the next slide.please. all right. so now what basically -- and thisis the key that you -- that i hope you will take with you from this talk. and that the-- and that is that the development of technology is not enough. now, we kind of new that. butwe are actually going through the painful process of figuring out exactly what it isthat you need to do to introduce technology in a case like this. so we have written thesoftware. we are going to be conducting workshops in morse code. we will be providing the schoolwith phones so that -- in order to conduct the workshops, and so on.now, so, really, i mean, there is a lot of
effort that -- so writing the app is actuallyyou might say the easy part. the tough part is really trying to see how to get that in.so what we are -- so on the one hand at the helen keller institute, we are able to targetour intervention at a very, very strategic place. the helen keller institute trains trainersof deaf-blind people and is one of the few people who does so. and we will be trainingone of the faculty at the institute, who is deaf-blind. and hoping that in this way theinterventions that we are introducing will over a period of time make their way intothe community. i hope, in the future meetings, that i'll be able to report a little bit onhow we were able to take this forward. thank you very much.>> satish babu: thank you, arun.
(applause) >> satish babu: for that excellent presentationon the different tools and technologies that are being developed today.we will have a question and answer session towards the end of the session. so pleasehold your questions. i'll move on now to dipendra manoha, the managertrustee of the action trust and is the assistant project manager for the daisy for all project.he is the president of the daisy forum of india, and the president of the national associationfor the blind delhi state. so we need two mixes here for this. one isthis one and can you please turn on the other mic?(feedback)
0804ap~2 >> dipendra manocha: good evening,everybody. so today i'm going to talk to you about something that -- for which the daisyconsortium family came into existence, and which is the accessibility of the content.accessibility of publications. accessibility of documents for people who cannot read normalprint. and people who cannot read normal print include people with blindness, low vision,illiterate, children with dyslexia, learning disabilities. people who cannot hold booksbecause of the problems and disability of both the hands. they cannot hold a book. theyare also persons with print disabilities. and temporary print disability also comesfor people who are actually driving a car. how do we access the book? the digital book,the book that comes on -- that can be read
on your mobile devices, whether they are yourmobile phones, tablets, computers, these publications are primarily the digital books.this was the -- the digital book is the primary format which then can be distributed to theend-users as braille, as audio, or as large print. or, it can be actually read directlyon a mobile device by persons with print disability. so four different formats in which it canreach a person. and these are braille, audio, large print, or the etext itself on a screenreader enabled mobile device. but the mother of all of these four formats is primarilythe digital book itself. we started using digital books almost twodecades ago or maybe three deck aitz ago, with the ad -- decades ago. with the adventof ipads and iphone and the tab gets let's,
the world, the rest of the world, so-callednormalcying persons, persons without print disabilities, also started using digital books.so we now had things like kindle, ibooks, et cetera, which were the mainstream industryhad started adopting the digital books. the challenge now when we said was that earlier,earlier to the kindle or the ibooks, we had to republish the books in digital format.books would be released as a hard copy book on paper and organisations would need to convertthese into digital format for making them accessible.with the mainstream adopting the digital books, our task obviously our strategy changed, andwe said why should we republish? why cannot the universal design principle be adoptedin the mainstream digital books?
and this is how the standards came into play,where all the knowledge that the blindness community had gathered together for makinga digital book, accessible digital book, was transferred to the mainstream industry andit became the epub books, the accessible epub book was all the wisdom and knowledge createdby the blindness community for the digital books being adopted by the mainstream industry.so it was a daisy consortium which primarily developed these standards, which are adoptedby the international digital publishers forum, idpf, which is the body that has created theepub standards for digital books. so even if you buy a kindle book, you mightnot see the epun on it, but under the hood, in the background, even the amazon would askpublishers to submit their bookness epub format
so that they could be included in the amazonbookstore. now, i'll just give you this thing that oncethis came into the mainstream industry, what changed for us? (computer scene reader talking) screen reader reading) however he knew the u.s. congress speech wasa historic policy statement to an important audience. his listeners were the very congressmenand women who would have to give their vote of approval to the nuclear deal that he wasseeking to strike with -- >> dipendra manocha: so what you heard wasthe etextbook that i was playing on my ius
device. and what i've gone is gone on to theamazon website and purchased this book and loaded it on my device and started readingit. this is no less a revolution for us. the day this technology became available, suddenlythe number of books that i could read jumped from a few hundred to almost 1.8 million.i mean, if you can just imagine the kind of ecstasy i must have gone through on that day.that suddenly now i could, like everybody else, could simply go to a web store, justbuy a book and start reading it. it was such an amazing thing to happen, because beforethat we had to get hold of the book, republish it, convert it, spend maybe ten thousand rupeeson the convention or oh on and then get a clans to read it. and this would happen toless than 1 percent of the published materials.
* (conversion)now, the good things in this almost ends at some things, because when it comes to developingcountries, i guess you can imagine that an ios device is a luxury.it's not something that everybody in developing countries, where 90 percent of persons withprint disabilities reside, can actually afford such a device.if i talk of an alternative of a smartphone it might be an android phone. but what happensif i shift to an android phone? and what happens when i shift from english to local language?is this revolution still available if i make these two changes?shift to a low cost smartphone, an android phone, and shift from english to an indianlanguage? what happens to it? i just would
like to demonstrate that.(demonstration) hold button to the right.(microphone feedback) (computer talking) 0804ap~2 >> dipendra manocha: so we are seeingthis change that the voice quality has gone down. it's hardly understandable. and thistechnology is working for hindi but not for many more indian languages. so the choiceof languages on this becomes almost negligible. and the voice quality of the technology hasgone down considerably. and for many languages for developing countries, even this basictechnology of speech may not exist. the challenge also is that when we shift tothe indian languages is that the font that
is used is a nonstandard font in most publicationsmentso if i go to a website of say any education board of the country, where they have putup the digital files of the books on the website for anybody to download, if it's in any indianlanguages, 99 out of 100 times it would be published in a font which is a nonstandardindian language fonts, which means my assistive technology would not be able to read thismuch what it was reading right now. the whole technology would fail.and the format also would not be epub. so unless -- what i'm actually saying is thatthere are two major key standards that need to be followed. and i would say that theseare the two key words when it comes to creating content in a language, especially the contentwhich is nonenglish local language content.
the first one is the format should be an smooepub, an accessible epub format and the font should be compliant to unicode. so these arekey words for us, epub and unicode. most of the public documents, publications, are currentlynot there right now. so there is a lot of work for us that if we want the content thereon the internet to be useful for persons with disabilities, these need to be adhering tothese accessibility standards or mainstream standards, actually, which allow accessibilityto be built into them. and the third one is the gaps for some ofour languages. technology gaps. such as having a good quality voice on all mobile devices.or the braille translation systems to be working on our devices. these need to be lug pluggedin to proceed -- need to be plugged in to
provide us with the accessibility.thank you so muc [applause]>> satish babu: thank you very much, dipendra manoha for that presentation. we have learneda lot regarding the issues that are currently being faced.now, i imagine the frustration when you move into 0804ap~2the indian languages, becauseof the lack of standardization on some of these. the good news of course is that thereis a lot of work now being done for standardization, and some of this technology gaps are now inthe process of being filled. so we hope that these efforts will bear fruit,maybe over the next two or three years, and that some of these pain points will be eased.so we now move on to sunil. i'm not going
to introduce sunil. he is well-known to allof you. >> sunil abraham: thanks, satish. you heardfrom dipendra manoha about the book famine. it is estimated that if you are a visuallyimpaired person in the developed world, then you may have access to, say, one or half percentof all the books that are available to those without that particular disability.if you are a similar person in india or some other part of the developing world, then thatpercentage goes dramatically south and you'll be fortunate if you have access to .001 percentof all the books available to those who don't have print related disabilities.if this forum is filled with fans of the multi-stakeholder model, and if this forum is filled 0027withwhat i might call itu betas, those who veemently
protested wcit, the so-called itu take overof the internet, then if you want to end the book famine you should call for the deathof the world intellectual property organization. after all, that is a multi lateral forum andwe don't want multi-lateralism. we should repeal all the global intellectual propertytreaties, which are hard lou, developed at this multi-lateral form. and once that isthe case, * once there is no more international copyright law, the global knowledge will beavailable to the disabled. of course, nobody is going to encourage meto continue with that line of argumentation, even the most fanatic fan of the multi-stakeholdermodel, even the most rabidcytic of the -- rabid critic will not want to disable the copyrightlaw.
in india, when the copyright act was amendedin 2012, we introduced a disability neutral and a works neutral exception to copyright.so it didn't matter what your disability was and it didn't mart what the -- matter whatthe copyrighted work was, whether it was software, music, a movie, book, et cetera, as long asyou can demonstrate that your disability prevents you from fully enjoying that copyrighted work,you had a right under the law to make an accessible version of the work and use it yourself andalso distribute it amongst similar disail fp abled -- disabled persons without askingpermission from the rights holder or giving any royalty to the rights holder.of course, the wipo is not as radical and as progressive as the indian government. theycame up with the marrakech treaty. very similar.
it was almost as if indian policy best practicewas exported to the international multi-lateral fora and the marrakech treaty does roughlythe same thing, but it's not disability and it's not works neutral. it only applies tobooks. it doesn't apply to any other copyrighted work and it only deals with the needs of theprint disabled. those are people with visual impairment and other similar or related impairmentsthat prevent them from holding and turning the pages of physical or electronic books.so the igf move, as paul wilson called it this morning, if it were truly concerned aboutthe rights of the disabled would workday and night extra hard in the implementation of* a multi-lateral treaty, the marrakech treaty, to ensure that the book famine is ended onceand for all.
so that is what i would call upon this forumto take 0804ap~2on as an immediate task. mr. manocha of course is a very humble andunas summing man and he doesn't talk about all the wonderful things that he has donementso i will talk about one project where we have the privilege of working with mr. manocha.this is a project funded by hunts foundation. and we are working under his leadership, undermr. manocha's leadership, to build support for 16 it hindi languages in a free softwaretts called espeak. and we are working extra hard to squash some bugs that are currentlynoticed on a free software screen reader called nvda. nvda of course won't work on a phonebut espeak will and will be very useful in the indian context.mr. manocha spoke about another crisis, and
this has to do with the lack of compliancewith the unicode standard that many documents unfortunately are still only available infont encoding. when it comes to government websites, this is particularly important andi have to congratulate the indian government again for having a national electronic accessibilitypolicy. but there are so many ways in which we getthings wrong. if you go to the department for information electronics technology, andyou try to access this 0804ap~2very same policy document, the national electronic accessibilitypolicy, it's not accessible. because the policy was born digital. then it was printed, thenthe secretary signed and sealed the document, then it was scanned, converted into a pdfand uploaded on to the website.
so egovernance which is the primary mode todayfor those who are disabled to access and participate in government, to be full citizens, has manyconcerns when it comes to accessibility. the case study i gave of the inaccessible policydocument is just one of the many challenges. so appear fart from -- apart from the softwarethat mr. manocha alluded to, apart from the standards that he stressed upon, there aremany other human challenges before our information society becomes fully welcoming to those wdisabilities.thank you. >> satish babu: thank you, sunil, for thatpresentation. these are many factors that get left out in the many discourses for thedifferently abled. i'll spend a couple minutes on the experiencethat my organisation and my state of kerala
has had for computing for the differentlyabled. we started our computing for the differentlyabled project about four years back. it's called insight and it's basically a free software,end-to-end stock for the -- stack for the visually impaired. which means that you startat the bear machine, brand new, without anything on it, and you install and then you configureand then you get working. and the entire thing is enabled even for a blind person.that has been kind of accepted by the government and it's now being rolled out to the villages.now, since it is at least a customized heavily locally, because it's an open source plat230r78, we have been able to make it do things that were not originally spended, that extensionof course is very important.
we also have a number of other programmesthat are being rolled out for disabled. * for example, audio -- not book, but audio magens zoo, which are current affairs information that gets to them. the interesting thing isthat many of these can, as dipendra said, can be used by the sighted people of the it'snot only exclusively for the blind people. and i'd like to highlight the case of oneblind programmer who has actually been developing a lot of software. he is based out of bambay and named krishna kant. he is project leader of a team of programmers. and theyhave been designing and building software, particular software that is being used inindia, for financial accounting, called grukata, which has been a big gap in the free softwareworld, because of the monopoly of proprietary
product in that space. and the free softwarecommunity had no solution to that gap until this particular product from krishna kantcame out. i can vouch for this because my organisation has been using this for the lastthree years for all financial accounting. the interesting part is when i shared thisinformation for the government of kerala, they said can this person design somethingfor the government? i said why not? so this last month.government of kerala has announcedthat it will go ahead with an extended version of this software for the government purpose.and the point is that this is still being led by a blind programmer. although the member,most members of his team are sighted. now, there is also a lot of effort, yesterdayi was speaking to someone from the lenard
international, an 0804ap~2ngo working withthe disabled as well. and their main focus is to equip the blind youth to get jobs insome of the sector, such as it. because it is held in very high esteem in india. so theyhave been working on this. and they are looking for technologies that will enable quick trainingof this community, so that they can be kind of elevated to a level where they can takeup these jobs. so some things are being done, but there arestill many gaps. and therefore it is -- it is kind of -- the onus is upon us as programmers,as developers, as leaders of these communities, to deliver, as arun has been trying to fromhis side, develop technological tools, that there is a need for interevenings conventionsand perhaps the -- interventions and perhaps
the government needs to step in and supportthe interventions that are being carried out in civil society.we will now open the floor to questions from the audience if there are any questions. andthen we will have a one-minute wrap up for each of the panelists. i see that gunela hasgone offline but the other people are here. so are there any other questions from theaudience? yes, can we have a microphone, please? >> audience: hel hello. i would like to knowabout any project that is going on for ict intervention using sign languages. >> dipendra manocha: yes, there is an indiansign language and there has been efforts for
standardizing the indian sign language. althoughit's a challenge of what to call as an indian sign language, because this is a languagewhich is very deeply connected to the culture. so with some exceptions, there is somethingcalled an indian sign language now. but the use of ict for making i objectediansign language easier -- indian sign language easier, there are tools that are being developedfor learning indian sign language. there is a dictionary. there is a cd, you can see adictionary of sign language, which enables people to learn sign language.there are a set of softwares for english, for example, for american sign language, etcetera, where it goes to the area of translation from audio to text or text to sign languageor sign language to text, primarily.
these obviously are currently not availablefor 0804ap~2languages in india. indian sign language currently doesn't have such privilegeto have such things, because a sign language translation software is something that isrequired, for example, if a student needs to be integrated into the mainstream classroom.the teacher would not know sign language the student needs to know what the teacher isspeaking. so these theses could come to the rescue, but unfortunately, it's not there.this is where we. >> audience: i heard all the presentations,and in the gun la presentation also she talked about the access to internet, provided thecommunication employment and the par advertise pation to us, the people with disabilities.and in our discussion what i find is we're
talking really to know that there is lotsof development happening. but what about the people who have the traditional knowledgesystem, but not more knowledge -- those who don't read and write also? and below the povertylevel, also. how to access them with this system also.as you give an example that it level also, we are providing, but why not in the system,also, in other sectors, is there any progress? i want to know about this. p.>> i think the question is on documenting the 0804ap~2indigenous practices and knowledgein a way that can be used by the differently abled h.(this is satish babu) is tha?>> >> arun mehta: what he is saying is how canicts get to people who are a, poor, and b,
who are illiterate and who are basically onlyable to understand the spoken speech. well, as it happens, problems of persons withilliteracy are similar to the problems of persons with low vision and that is that youhave difficulty with the printed text. so as books become accessible to bind people,they also become accessible to persons who are illiterate.as far as, you know, cost and so on, you know, money is concerned, that problem is not goingaway. however, technology is becoming a lot cheaper. so the hardware at least is becomingincreasingly affordable, even in villages you find people now increasingly with smartphones.the problem of the software still remains. and that is where open source software, freeopen source software, has a major role to
play in trying to reduce the overall costof these technologies. the hardware is no longer the limiting factor. it is much morethe software. and i think a lot of the discussion in the previous session was also related tothat, and i'm sure that discussion isn't over yet. but perhaps that is a start.>> satish babu: so are there any other questions? minute each and then gunela. she is goingto come on after the other people are over. she have will come on. please be prepared.so for the summing up, i would like to start with sunil. you have one or two minutes tosum up your thoughts. >> sunil abraham: i think there are a rangeof other technologies which are also key, and it seems that in india and in many partsof the asia-pacific language come poubds the
accessibility challenge. the technology thatwe need are optical character transmission and machine translation. if only possible,we also need speech-to-text, not just text to speech. and given that we are a very proudpeople and we don't want to give up our scripts, we don't want to sacrifice our linguisticdiversity, cracking the accessibility problem in this region is compounded by the linguisticdiversity. so it truly makes things difficult. and since the private sector does not seea feasible market, it is up to the government to invest large amounts of money to ensurethat this critical infrastructure is available. thank you.>> dipendra manocha: so just touching up on two points,so then two points here. the first one, what
our friend from nepal said about the traditionalknowledge, to be saved. and also the knowledge to reach out to people who cannot read print.audio of course is a very powerful medium which we the blindness community has beenusing. and like with other digital text, we actually developed this technology to an extentwhich is extremely good for such kind of documentation and books or useful materials to be, firstof all, created in an audio format in a structure and to listen to it. and we have a lot ofopen source tools and know how, how to actually capture and disseminate this knowledge tothe target group that you are mentioning. so i think that there is a big opportunityhere of convergence of these two different diverse stakeholders to make use of this technology.the second part, which i want to emphasize,
is that when it comes to the accessible printproductions, 0039there is a technology gap or something. but there is a whole ecosystemthat needs to be in place. and even if a single component of the ecosystem is not there inplace, the whole infrastructure or whole system of accessible information falls apart. andthis ecosystem actually relates to production, production of -- they would prefer that themainstream production itself creates books which are born accessible. otherwise, let'sat least make it in a way so that it can be reproduced easily in an accessible format.and the second component is the distribution network. how would it reach using the powerof the internet to the pen or people in did i have -- to the person or people in differentor all parts of the uncountries, as remote
as possible. but they should be able to getthis content *. and i feel the internet and internet technologies and softwares have alarge role to play there. and the third one being the equipment andthe assistive technology in the hands of the end-user, which is compatible with the distributionsystem. and there, the smartphones and the apps and the text to speech systems, et cetera,have a big role to play. we need to make all of this work. currently there are gap, anddue to those gaps, although we seem that we are almost there, but balls there are certaingaps in the whole ecosystem, the system actually breaks. and the majority of the people havegot very little access to the real information. thank you.>> satish babu: thank you very much.
>> arun mehta: there are two aspects thati would like to react to. one is the whole question of how do we deal with the multiplicityof languages and so on, in terms of accessibility. what we haven't talked about on this panelis the improved -- is the improvements that we are starting to see in automatic translation.just as with speech-to-text, the progress in the last few years has been quite dramatic.and today i am able to, without fear, just demonstrate speech to speak on a panel likethis and be confident that it will work. i mean, this confidence i haven't had for morethan a few months so far. a few years ago, speech recognition was pathetic.you needed to train the systems. you really to -- really it was hard work. but now theyrecognize indian accents ease yes and so on.
similarly, with 0804ap~2automatic translation,those of you who are using these facilities on the internet, may have noticed that ithas become much easier now to carry on e-mail communications with people who speak completelydifferent languages. and yes, there are times when there are different misunderstanding,but it works well. again with indian languages we don't have that much progress but it'sonly a plaert of time. and that brings me to the second point. andthat is that as the bible says, better than giving a person fish is to teach a personhow to catch fish. one of the most rewarding experiences that i have had a as a teacheris when, under the guidance of dipendra manoha we ran a programme teaching visual basic toblind people. and that was, you know, the
people who were part of that programme wereextremely motivated. and i think they have gone on to do extremely well. but there arevery few such developers, as was pointed out by satish. people like krishna kant are ratherand we need to see a lot more of them. that is the best way to have accessible softwaresand technologies. but in your development team there should be disabled people. as imentioned, software development has become really, really easy now. in the west, thereare huge movements to try and bring software writing literacy into the mainstream, particularlyamong women. and i believe that we need to extend that very, very forcefully into thecommunity of persons with disabilities. that if they learn how to write software, firstand foremost, the problem of accessible software
will be reduced. the person will learn a veryvaluable skill. and the commitment of the person to that software will be for a lifetime.because that software is something that is improving your own life. i mean as is thecase with tv roman max speak. that is up to date because he uses it on a daily basis himsech >> satish babu: can we go on to gunela.yes, we can hear you. please go ahead. >> gunela astbrink: can you hear me?excellent. okay. i think you can. so, i just want to say, look, i am delighted with allthe knowledge that has been shared in this session from our panel of experts in disabilityand technology. and a couple of things i just wanted to raise. we heard about the epub standard,and that really arose from the disability
community, meeting a very important need forpeople with disabilities and dipendra talked about that in detail and how that has actuallybecome a mainstream standard. and he brought up only one example. but thereare others. where, for example, the scanner was originally a tool for blind people tobe able to access material. and also, voice recognition works, and it's for people withphysical disabilities and this has now become a mainstreamed product.we heard from sunil about what can the internet community do to try and improve the wipo reforms.so i'm just looking at lots of really interesting ideas that have come from this panel. we donot want to lose those. and i believe strongly that the internet community can work withsome of these particular issues. and certainly
and maybe we can look at setting up a regionaltheme for promoting and training of young people with disabilities in software developmentwith programmes like that already happening in india. when we do these on a broader scale.and so i raise that challenge here at the aprigf to see how we can move forward withthis. so thank you, and thank you for the speakers,for coming here and sharing this with usment and i look forward to ongoing communicationabout some of the issraised today. >> satish babu: as we close, i would justlike to mention that the technologies for the differently abled are almost always onestep behind the mainstream technologies. and sometimes this can be a problem. right now,in icann, we getting into the international
liesed domain names. when this happens, you'llhave a problem that people are going to compose e-mail ids in nonroman scripts. now that mightpose a problem to some of our users in india, because their screen readers may not be capableof rendering such scripts. so we have lots more work to do in order to ensure that weare able to keep pace with the development. i have one comment from an online participant,julie madam president macfee, who says thank the speakers for a very interesting and valuablepresentation. on behalf of the organizers, gunela and i,i would like to thank all the participants. gunela, dipendra manoha, sunil and arun. weapologize for the initial glitch when we got started. but it's good to know that we fixedit. so the sessions tomorrow will not have
it. so we made a contribution to the generalgood. thank you to the audience who are here andraised questions. and we hope that this work will continue and all the people here areveterans and that the work will continue for the future.we are signing off. thank you.(applause) (end of session, 17:00) services provided by:caption first, inc. p.o. box 3066monument, co 80132 1-877-825-5234+001-719-481-9835
www.captionfirst.com ********this text is being provided in a rough draft format. communication access realtime translation(cart) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not bea totally verbatim record of the proceedings. 0804ap~2copyright � 2014 show/hide header
