Visually-impaired students to take help of 'Swalekhan' for writing exam

A Pune-based NGO has developed the app, which will work through mobile phones with the help of a normal keyboard, helping the visually challenged students to learn typing on their own

Class VIII students of Victoria Memorial School for the Blind in Tardeo are excited for their upcoming exams as they won't have to search for people to write all of their papers. Their school has decided to conduct a few papers with the help of technology where these visually-challenged students will be able to write their papers without any help. Thanks to a novel app - Swalekhan, developed by an NGO - Niwant Andha Mukta Vikasalay, which will help visually challenged people to learn typing easily in Devnagri fonts.

It has always been a hassle for visually challenged students to find writers for examinations. Even if they found writers, there would be other issues such as last-minute cancellations and permissions. There have been cases when a visually challenged student had to give up on certain examination because of a writer-related issue.

However, the Pune-based NGO is trying to put an end to this chaos with their newly developed technology - Swalekhan, which literally means writing on your own. The app works through mobile phone with the help of a normal keyboard attached to it helping the visually challenged students to learn typing on their own.

Like this one school in Tardeo, Kamla Mehta School in Dadar is also running a pilot project for few students as Niwant plans to take it to more schools for visually challenged persons.

Explaining the concept, Uma Badve, Trustee of the NGO, said, "Niwant has been working for the welfare of visually challenged for some time now. We are aware of the issue of finding writers for examination, especially for those appearing for the exam in Marathi medium. It led to an idea of making use of technology to help visually challenged students appear for the examination on their own. While experts of the technology worked on the projects, volunteers from our centre who are themselves visually challenged were closely associated with the work of development to make it most user-friendly."

Currently, there are 100 government-run schools for visually challenged children in Maharashtra which are all in Marathi medium out of which Niwant is already running pilot projects with 60 schools.

How Swalekhan works
There are a total of 73 lessons in this application for visually challenged people to learn and practice typing in Devnagari through the regular computer keyboard. This application talks to the user in order to make them understand the process and guide in case of mistakes or errors. In some lessons, there are games designed to increase the speed of identification of one key, its use and typing.

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