Insight has achieved yet another feat in its tenacious efforts at making technology accessible to those people who are denied the sense of sight. Insight has released the alpha version of OCR Insight (Optical Character Recognition), an application that can be used to read text in English. The application scans the printed text to produce an image file. This image file is processed using the OCR engine, which converts it to a text file. The text file can then be read using screen reader software like ORCA. The application that was released on 21 October 2010 is hosted at https://sourceforge.net/projects/ocr-insight/.

OCR Insight is one long leap in Insight’s determination to make the visually challenged independent. A written or printed text is foreign to people with visual challenges and they are pushed to rely on others for reading them. OCR Insight will disengage them from being dependent as the task of converting the text into computer readable form can be executed without any assistance. With OCR Insight, the visually challenged can ‘read’ academic and official documents, books, newspapers and even legal text. The application lets them explore a virgin world of knowledge, thus helping them earn their long-denied right to learn and meeting their eagerness to acquire knowledge.

Insight is conducting a two-week training programme for the visually challenged employees of Industrial Training & Production Unit, Kallambalam, a village in Thiruvananthapuram. The unit is run by Welfare Association for the Visually Challenged. The programme was inaugurated on 11 October 2010 by Shri. Biju Gopalan, former councillor, Varkala Municipality. This programme is a part of Insight’s continuing efforts at reaching out to the visually challenged people living in remote areas of the state. For the next fourteen days, the unit in Kallambalam will be a makeshift Insight centre providing training in basic ICT tools accessible to the visually challenged.

A three-day training programme on accessible technologies for the visually challenged was held at the Insight centre in CHMK Library, Calicut University. The session that began on 4 October 2010 was attended by library staff of the university. The Insight centre at the university provides free computer training to the visually challenged students there. The Insight wing that was inaugurated on 28 January 2010 has succeeded in assisting the visually challenged students in meeting their educational requirements. The centre also acts as an archive of e-books and e-journals, thus helping them exploit the potential of the library that was otherwise inaccessible for them.