Under a colourful canopy on the grounds of the Ali Yaver Jung National Institute for the Hearing Handicapped, dozens of students from the Happy Home School on Wednesday, milled around hearing about fantastic technologies that would ostensibly make their lives better.

The occasion was World Braille Day and the students of Xavier’s Research Centre for the Visually Challenged (XRCVC) had put on an exhibition of gadgets and technologies that would help the visually impaired in their education.

The main attraction of the exhibition was the ATM machine that had been designed by the NRC Corporation, to suit the needs of the visually challenged.

Nagesh Nayak, personal services manager at NCR was mobbed by visually challenged students who took great pleasure in working the device.

The ATM machine on display was equipped with a text-to-speech engine that provides detailed instructions for the visually challenged user. Besides, all the functions of the ATM were mapped onto the keypad so that the visually challenged person can feel and type in his/her response.

But are we likely to see such ATM machines across branches in the city? Nayak believes so. “It’s just a question of customising the software for various banks. With a little bit of guidance as we had when ATMs first came to India, there is no reason for a bank not to have one. You should be seeing them within the calendar year of 2012,” he said.

Most of the technology in the exhibition though, was geared towards facilitating the education of the visually impaired. Rakesh Paswan, 20, has

been blind since he was three years old. Today he’s a first year student at XRCVC doing a Bachelor’s in Arts (BA) in economics, commerce and history. Paswan was giving a
demonstration of the NVDA technology where a push of a button could result in an audible reading of the text on screen. The reader was available in English, Hindi and Marathi. A couple of tables away, an improved version of the same technology, the Zoom Ex device, was on display. Fitted with a camera, it would scan a document on to screen and then use the digital audio information system (DAISY) to provide an audio
output of the text.

However, not everything on display was for serious use. Braille-imprinted playing cards and a special chess set designed for the visually impaired proved to be a great draw. And as the visually impaired students from Happy Home walked around, from table to table, holding on to each other’s elbows, their faces lit up with excitement at the thought of the bright future that lay before them.