[Wikimediaindia-l] Visually challenged people and Indic language wikipedias - Video

[Surya Prakash]

The only word I said after reading this was "WOW!"

I appreciate Mr. Satyasheelan's efforts. In Tamil Nadu also, few (very few)
schools are using Tamil Wikipedia. (for usual children)

Thank you Alex for sharing this story. :)

*$U®¥∩*
http://goo.gl/RoMyo.com <http://FirefoxSurya.blogspot.com>
http://about.me/suryaceg



2011/8/22 Shiju Alex <shijualexonline at gmail.com>

> Dear Wikimedians
>
> I would like share an unusual story (unusual - especially for Indic
> language wiki communities) that Malayalam wiki community had faced few
> months back.
>
> In the month of February 2011, I had received an SOS call from a school
> teacher (Satyasheelan) who is teaching at the Government School for the
> Blind in the Kasargod distric<http://www.webelmediatronics.in/brlads/directory_Kerala.htm>t
> of Kerala. Satyasheelan was seeking Malayalam wikipedian's support to fix
> few issues that he and his students faced with few Malayalam alphabets when
> they  read Malayalam wikipedia using a speech synthesizing software called
> eSpeak <http://espeak.sourceforge.net/>. His phone call was surprise to us
> since Malayalam wikimedians were not aware that visually challenged people
> are using Malayalam wikipedia. (We were aware about the existence of a
> software by Santhosh (named Dhawni <http://dhvani.sourceforge.net/>) to
> read unicode Malayalam (and other Indic languages also) which is in its
> early stages of development). So Satyasheelan's call was surprising.
>
> After his phone call few Malayalam wikipedians (Junaid, Thachan Makan, and
> I) contacted Jonathan Duddington <http://sourceforge.net/users/jonsd>, the
> primary developer (?) of eSpeak, and we worked with him to fix the issues
> for Malayalam that Satyasheelan had pointed out. Jonathan  fixed the issues
> pretty fast and later Satyasheelan informed us that now they are able to use
> Malayalam wikipedia without any issues.
>
> Later while we were planning for the 4th Malayalam wiki meetup<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%B5%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%AA%E0%B5%80%E0%B4%A1%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%AF:%E0%B4%B5%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%BF_%E0%B4%AA%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%B0%E0%B4%B5%E0%B5%BC%E0%B4%A4%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%A4%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%B8%E0%B4%82%E0%B4%97%E0%B4%AE%E0%B4%82/4>(2011 July 11) at Kannur, we decided to invite Satyasheelan to conduct a
> session, since Malayalam wikimedians liked to hear the experience of
> students of Blind school (using Malayalam wikipedia). But when Satyasheelan
> came for the meetup we were surprised and taken aback when we learnt that
> Satyasheelan is also a visually challenged person. Few of the his colleagues
> (who are also visually challenged) also attended the meetup. Satyasheelan
> was accompanied by his son, Nalin.
>
> The meetup was attended by more than 80 Malayalam wikipedians. Few photos
> are available here<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Malayalam_Wikimeetup_4_-_Kannur_11Jun2011>.
> We are happy that Bishaka, Hisham, and Tory were kind enough to join us for
> this meetup. There were various programs conducted as part of this meetup
> (the report of the meetup is available at various locations (in Malayalam)).
> Definitely the highlight of the meetup was the demonstration by
> Satyasheelaman. So this mail is about that.
>
> Malayalam wikimedian Ajay Kuyiloor took extra efforts to record
> Satyasheelan's session. We are sharing an edited version of this session
> assuming that this information will help other Indic language wiki
> communities.
>
> The video of Satyasheelan's session is available here: *
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1T3HeBTvU* The duration of the video is
> around 9 minutes. We specially thank Ajay Kuyiloor, Girish Mohan, and Jithin
> who worked on this video. We admit the low quality of video since we were
> not prepared for such a session. Inconvenience due to this is deeply
> regretted.
>
> Malayalam community is welcoming your comments regarding this story so that
> the discussion regarding this will benefit rest of the Indic wiki
> communities also. We are actually humbled by the fact that work we do in
> wikipedia is reaching out to people from all wakes of life.
>
> *NOTE:* Satyasheelan specially thanked Malayalam wikimedians for creating a
> special navigational template<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%AB%E0%B4%B2%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%82:%E0%B4%85%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%B7%E0%B4%B0%E0%B4%AE%E0%B4%BE%E0%B4%B2%E0%B4%BE%E0%B4%B8%E0%B5%82%E0%B4%9A%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95_%28%E0%B4%B8%E0%B4%AE%E0%B4%97%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%B0%E0%B4%82%29>for reaching out easily to wikipedia articles. I still remember in 2008 when
> Malayalam wikipedia user:Sadhik Khalid
> <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%89%E0%B4%AA%E0%B4%AF%E0%B5%8B%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%A4%E0%B4%BE%E0%B4%B5%E0%B5%8D:Sadik_Khalid>created
> this template, some of us had doubted the need of such a template. Our doubt
> was, why such a template is required when users can reach out to articles
> easily using serach box. Now to our surprise we understood this template is
> very much useful for the visually challenged people (whom we never thought
> about before).
>
> Video of Satyasheelan's  session is available here:*
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1T3HeBTvU*
>
> Thanks
>
> Shiju Alex
>
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