I remember there was a team of two researchers. Ms. Anuradha and Mr. Desai who worked with him all of them worked from super computer research centre of IISC Rohit ----- Original Message ----- From: "Harish Kotian" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <accessindia@accessindia.org.in> Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2007 10:57 PM Subject: Re: [AI] history of computer education for blind in india
> Hello all > > Thanks for the interest in my story. I think I shall put in different > parts. This is part 2. > > Thankfully I did recall the name of the developer of the look alike of > Mimic synthesizer. He is Prof. M.P. Srinivasan. I would call him the > pioneer of access technology in India. Not only did he design speech > synthesizer, I also saw a working prototype of electronic notetaker and > Braille printer. He was totally ready for technology transfer for these 2 > items. Sadly, there were no takers for it. Probably, it could be still > resorected, provided somebody takes up the manufacturing of it. We would > have an inexpensive Braille printers which would have been immensely > useful to blind students and other professionals. > > With the problems of supplies cropping up with IC's of speech > synthesizers, he gave up working on it.He sourced New Talk, which was a > clone of Tiny Talk. In mid 90's sound cards became an add on to the PC > hardware, Tiny Talk, supported a large number of hardware synthesizer's > and also supported a software synthesizer for the first time. Making it to > work with software synthesizer was very tricky and I did manage to > configure it for many blind folks. I also managed to make Mimic > synthesizer to work with it. One could also run it in the DOS box of > Windows. I managed to make it work this way as well. > > Prof. M.P. Srinivas migrated to US later on and soon thereafter the > development of access technology ceased at I I S e. > > Another great soul was Prof Guha, I hope I can remember the name right. He > was with IIT Delhi and had his lab at AIIMS. He too made novel > contribution. I had seen a system with the teacher and the student > connected by seperate terminals. The teacher both sighted and blind could > use it. The system was designed for teaching the blind in schools. > > I had seen a high tech system to plot graphics in Braille sheets developed > by him. > > I don't know what happend down the road to these systems. > > Networked teaching was also tried out IIT Kharagpur, I had myself not > experienced it and can't offer any comments. > > In early 90's I met Prof. Patankar from BARC. He showed keen interest in > making access technology. I interacted closely with him. He was wanting to > make a terminal, with Braille keyboard, with its own wordprocessor and OCR > and speech synthesizer. I saw a working prototype except the OCR > functioning. He gave me one unit for field trials. One issue on which I > strongly differed with him was that, I was asking him to make the > application software of memory resident type, which would give us the > freedom to use it with any application of our choice and not to be > restricted to the one he offered. He kept on promising he would do it on a > later date. I realised he was not going to do that and one day he did > make his intentions clear. I parted ways with him. Later on he went on to > recieve the President's award but sadly, none of us ever got to used the > device. > > When at Bangalore, I came across the vidya vriksha project. Sriram and > myself visited their center at Chennai. We evaluated it thoroughly and > made known to them some small shortcommings which were making it difficult > to use. Sadly, again, the feedback was not incorporated and a wonderful > multi lingual editor did not make a good tool for us. > > I'll call it a day now and more in part 3. > Warmly > Harish. > > To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with the subject unsubscribe. > > To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, > please visit the list home page at > http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in > To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
