Monday, March 15, 2010 – Friday, March 19, 2010
According to WHO statistics, 161 million people live with a disabling visual impairment, of whom 37 million are blind and 124 million are people with vision impairments. Every 5 seconds, a person goes blind. Every minute, a child goes blind. About 90% of these people live in developing countries – Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. Even more startling, 9 out of 10 blind children in developing countries have no access to education.* Last week on “Social Enterprise of the Day”, we featured five organizations that are making path breaking efforts to help the print and visually impaired follow their dreams and overcome the challenges that life has served them.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Social Enterprise of the Day – AUIRE
AUIRE is a social business that develops low cost assistive devices to the visually impaired. Their main product is a low-cost, portable color and money identifier. This device reads the color of an object or the value of a bill and speaks the name aloud. Developed in Brazil by a group of engineering students, the Auire will be marketed commercially in the near future.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Social Enterprise of the Day – Inclusive Planet
Inclusive Planet enables people with visual and print impairment to share accessible content with each other, build conversations around the experience, and make friends in the global print impaired community. Lack of accessible materials and content is a major problem among the visually impaired, and Inclusive Planet is a community-driven solution to resolve this global problem. On Inclusive Planet, users can create geographically, culturally, and topically relevant communities around accessible content and overcome the barriers they face.
Bookbole, the flagship international initiative of Inclusive Planet, is a website that is designed for easy access for the visually impaired. While there are standard guidelines for websites to ensure that text-to-speech software can easily “read” the text out, most websites do not adhere to these guidelines. The result is a lot of clutter and subsequent loss of information for the visually impaired. Bookbole solves this by making varied content available in easily accessible form.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Social Enterprise of the Day – Daisy Consortium
The DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) Consortium was formed in May 1996 by talking book libraries to lead the worldwide transition from analog to digital talking books. Members of the Consortium actively promote the DAISY Standard for Digital Talking Books because it promises to revolutionize the reading experience for people who have print disabilities. Specifically, the Consortium’s vision is that all published information is available to people with print disabilities, at the same time and at no greater cost, in an accessible, feature-rich, and navigable format.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Social Enterprise of the Day – Braille Without Borders
Braille Without Borders aims to empower blind people so they can set up projects and schools for other blind people. What began as an initiative to create Braille in the Tibetian language, Braille Without Borders soon began a preparatory school for the primary education of blind children. To realize the idea of the blind as an independent section of society, Braille Without Borders opened a vocational training school that provided the blind employment skills and encouraged entrepreneurship. This included vocations such as cheese farming, animal husbandry, gardening, theatre, and painting. The concept soon spread across the globe so more blind and visually impaired people have access to education and a better future. As part of Braille Without Borders, the IISE (International Institute Of Social Entrepreneurship) was established in Kerala, India. The IISE aims to help visually-challenged children discover their dreams and give them the tools to function independently in society.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Social Enterprise of the Day – Mitra Jyothi
Mitra Jyothi aims to integrate people with disability into mainstream society in India. With the belief that all people with disability have the potential to become independent and self-sufficient, Mithra Jyothi assists the visually impaired through a variety of training and support programs, helping them become independent and instilling in them the confidence to achieve their goals. Some of these programs include the Talking Book Library, catering to general reading needs and educational needs of visually impaired students, and the Independent Living Skills Program, teaching visually impaired women life skills like mobility, home management skills, cooking, hygiene, etc. They also have a Braille Transcription Center that converts books required by visually impaired students into Braille, a Job Placement Cell that is open to both the visually impaired and people with other disabilities, and a Computer Training Center that provides computer training to the visually impaired and low vision students.
*Statistics via Braille Without Borders
