Classics in Braille

Jun 25, 2013 - Priya Sreekumar

Reading books is something that should not be restricted to only people born with the gift of sight. The visually-challenged too need books for education, to be aware of developments and to earn themselves a place in society. NGO Faith India has recently translated literary books like the Ramayana, Geetha, Panchatantra, some of the Vedas, Sree Narayana Guru’s works and the Upanishads into Braille for the visually-challenged people.

Talking about this, Ambujaksham- library incharge says, “We don’t have too many books for the blind people to read, be it in colleges or outside of it. Hence, we decided to translate some of the famous books into Braille for it to be accessible to the visually-challenged individuals too.”
Five blind students themselves have done the translation into Braille. The work has been a long and arduous one, with the visually-challenged individuals working with several limitations.
Braille script is a system of raised dots on either a paper or a surface. Hence the requirements were of special Braille paper and typewriters and a Brailler. Although a Brailler does make work faster, the availability of only one machine necessitated the rest of the work being done by hand, which is time consuming, slowing down the translation.

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