Pratham Books and Radio Mirchi Content , We4U content

Pratham Books, in association with Radio Mirchi, has created content and hosted it online on Soundcloud.

I am happy to share that Pratham Books has granted permission for us to add that list of files to our catalog.

In the next revision of the catalog, you will find this content as part of the catalog. The content is in 8 Indian languages - English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Urdu and Punjabi.

We will ,of course, post when this content is live.

The next refresh will also have a lot of rich Oriya content from our partner organisation - We4U.

We are very grateful for both these contributions.

Who will benefit from the online audio library - updated list

Based on the actual usage of the library, we are now releasing the updated list of people who can benefit from CLABIL. It is pure joy to see that more and more people come up to say that they could use this content.

1. The visually impaired
2. Rural children
3. Underprivileged children in urban areas
4. Girl and women children who are not sent to school due to gender issues
5. All adults who cannot read or write and therefore cannot access knowledge on demand.
6. Children of Indian origin who don’t know the Indian script and therefore the literature is also lost to them.
7. Muscular Dystrophy
8. Children with dyslexia or print related learning disability, who can use audio.
9. Older people who lose sight as they age.
10. Community Programs where books cannot reach or cannot be used due to low effective literacy. This content can be used on public broadcast or local radio as a means of change / information dissemination. (we have recently spoken with the change management team of Swachh Bharat Mission, who came up with this idea)
11. The terminally ill who need to access content on demand.

Here's to More!!!

What is wrong with screenreader format of accessibility

Pre read:
http://www.heydonworks.com/article/responses-to-the-screen-reader-strategy-survey

I have never been fond of screenreaders. For a very intuitive reason - they try to ADAPT the user experience of the sighted for us. And that, you see, is not how user experience for the differently abled should be designed. Every user interface should be designed with that user in mind - First. The idea of adapting the user interface of one category of users to another category of users is prima facie counter intuitive.

With the mobile phones and touch phones, that problem becomes worse. A mobile phone, as we know, can become a real friend with an audio guide like Siri. Instead, my accessibility talkback feature first trains me on how to touch the various areas of the screen to reach the app i want.

From a UX perspective, thats all wrong. I don't need to know where the apps are on a screen. I just need to open the one i want. Which means i should be able to tell the device what i want, and the device should be able to meet that need.

We have created touch screen laptops for our sighted users. If that's possible, tell me again why complete voice navigation based devices appear so unimaginable.

Here, then, is UX Design 101, as applied to differently abled users that we work with:
1. Voice Based Recognition and authentication - this includes special training on local accent customisation.

2. Voice based program triggers - You do realise that actually, we only need a screen to show someone sighted our work? So the screen should not be the primary trigger for program activation, change and closure. The voice command or tactile buttons should be.

3. Intra Program actions - this can be website usage, using office or personal productivity software, or playing games. The intra program actions can easily be designed so that they are voice controlled. We should be able to review our work using playback.
I highly recommend the native built in talk back feature of MS Excel (not sure if its still there in the new MS Office)

4. Braille? Maybe: We may or may not know Braille. That's all.

Times Now TV - Esha's ONline library broadcast in 80 countries

Our online library, CLABIL and our Outreach program with the library were covered by Times Now as part of the news. This clip was broadcast in 80 countries around the world. Thank you for the support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISl7Obc5wJk

The Founder in an inteview on Famousparenting.com

Our Founder was interviewed by famousparenting.com .

In this freewheeling chat, she talks about her journey as a social entrepreneur and parent.

http://famousparenting.com/conversation-ms-nidhi-arora-esha/

Do read the interview here.

Needed: Translators

As part of our summer project, we want to create more and more content in Indian languages.

One of the things I really want to do, is make available classics like Black Beauty, Sherlock Holmes etc in Indian languages. This has 2 advantages - these classics are deemed read for most higher education courses, and two, we would really like to make this literature also available to people who don't know English.

So if you know one or more languages, please do some translations of classics for us. We will be very grateful.

Thank you!

The Esha Summer Project 2016 - Interim Report

On the 10th of April,we launched the Esha Summer Project 2016. We were aiming for a scale we had not done so far.

The summer project this year had about 6 options to choose from - each option had its own lessons and deliverables.

The objective was two fold - first, to benefit from the fresh perspective brought by the interns. The second, and the more important objective, was to expose the youth to the potential of this country through the formal, templatised, CLABIL Outreach Program.

We received 120 applications from various sources, of which about 45 interns were selected to share the summer with us. We also set up a remote collaboration project management office with 3 people - all of whom worked from home. Using simple google documents and online PMO platforms, we worked on managing this project without meeting each other.

Of the 45 interns, 7 are working on the CLABIL Outreach Program - in areas like Bareily, Devangere, Bangalore and of course, the NCR region.

A lot more volunteers are working on recording audio content in languages like Hindi, English, Malyalam, Tamil, Telugu etc.

We had one volunteer who interned with us on social media management and was able to meet social media metrics for Twitter,m Facebook and also SEO. This was a rare chance when a student got independent responsibility for Social Media metrics. 

We also had 2 interns who expressed an interest in creating communication videos, but they could not think of storyboards for their communication.

The best thing about the project was that the project management office was also staffed by the interns. One of the assignments was the PMO.

Some of the students would like to do COP near their houses once the schools reopen in July, and some have asked to continue to work with Esha after the internship is over.

Next year, we want to introduce a tighter selection process so that post selection dropouts are low. What we did well was to keep a tight feedback and followup loop so that all interns were able to keep on track with their progress.

This was our first experience of dealing with interns at this scale, and we now feel confident that we will be able to manage a larger scale next year.

We are on Radio Mirchi Bangalore!!

Who is in Bangalore and can listen to Radio Mirchi from now to 4 pm? The online library is going to be featured on Radio Mirchi from now to 4 pm (2 pm to 3 pm and then 3 pm to 4 pm). Tune In!

The SOIL SIP Team is the best SIP Team of 2015-16 batch, and we have an article in The Better India

For some reason, we missed mentioning it here..

The SIP Team of 2015-16 - Saranya, Cauvery, Rethina and Vigneshwar, were adjudged the best outgoing SIP Team of SOIL. This is from out of 18 SIP teams this year.

https://www.facebook.com/atindranath.bhattacharya.3/posts/10209059202022189

And here is a link to the awesome videos that chronicle the journey of this group:
Esha Journey for this batch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaYggRDCD8M

Tour De Vision Promotion Events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp4EKTeA2u4

Tour De Vision 2016 Final Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92dOptvt6a4

Batch Feedback:

Rethina: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrJOc7vp9EM

Vigneshwar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NctvIfGe32s

And the previous year's batch, which truly laid the foundation for this batch's success:

Amit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziqKDdyNwW8

Vrishin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-SHeVjtOoc

Pooja Singh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDDxyFQoOp8

Karen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBAsZh5QF9o


Part II:
Just yesterday, the Esha blog was featured among the top blogs of India, and today, The Better India carried a story on our CLABIL and CLABIL Outreach Projects.

We are so grateful! Please do spread the word. The idea of CLABIL is not for us to get credit, but for everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, to get access to this knowledge and literary resource.

http://www.thebetterindia.com/56802/library-for-audio-books-india-clabil/