A hard-won software opens up a whole new world Smriti Daniel Ashoka Bandula Weerawardhana
Speaks to visually impaired who has come up with a programme that will help others like him to gain access to research material, textbooks and internet resources
“I was born in a remote village in the Uva province and I was the first child of the family,” says Ashoka Bandula Weerawardhana. Sitting in a computer lab in the Colombo University, Ashoka explains that at first his family didn’t notice their son was suffering from a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa. “My parents didn’t know anything was wrong with my eyes because my eyes looked very normal,” he says. “It was my teacher who actually recognised that this child might have something wrong with his eyesight.” Ashoka was five and the degenerative eye disease already had him in its grip. “Now I am almost totally blind.”
It’s been a long road from that classroom to this lab, but Ashoka’s ambition today is to make the path easier to traverse for those who follow in his footsteps. His work on a programme that converts Sinhala text to speech will make dozens of research, textbooks and internet resources available to the visually impaired in Sri Lanka. It has been a monumental task but he remains devoted to it, motivated by his own struggles to make his way in a world designed to favour the sighted.
Able to distinguish only between light and dark, Ashoka has nevertheless been an ardent student all his life. Enrolled at the School for the Blind in Ratmalana, he broke records when he got the best O/L results in their history, no small feat considering the institution first opened its doors in 1912. Ashoka is quick to acknowledge his results – 4 Ds and 4 Cs – wouldn’t hold up against ablebodied competition. Still, for someone who could only study when someone else read his textbook out aloud to him, Ashoka is keenly aware of the hurdles he had to overcome. To sit for his exams he had to write on a braille slate, which was time consuming and slowed him down. Having done so well, however, meant that doors were opened for him. A scholarship to study at S. Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia gained him admittance into one of the finest boys’ schools in the country and from there he was able to enter the University of Kelaniya, where he studied sociology, mass communication and Sinhala.
Mingled with the successes were disappointments. Though he was very keen on learning languages, he was not permitted to do so because of a dearth of examiners who could correct a braille transcript in a foreign tongue. “It was very frustrating and very painful, because you didn’t have the chance to study what you wanted to study. I got good results for all three courses but none of the departments would allow me to specialise.” Hobbled by his disability, Ashoka found there was no room for him at the Department of Social Services – his new work place – either. “With all my abilities I realised I couldn’t work with the normal office. I was as good as any other graduate but due to my blindness, I could do nothing…It was a pensionable job but I thought that would not be my place to stay. That was a turning point for me.”
It was around this time that Ashoka heard about screen reading technology that allowed the blind to make use of computers and other gadgets like mobile phones. Inspired by the possibilities, Ashoka says he immediately set about discovering what he could. Initially, it proved difficult. “I have actually cried to get this technology. I learned it the hard way,” he says explaining that though he attended basic courses on how to type and keyboard orientation, these proved less than useful in his search. The answer lay in the internet, where Ashoka discovered hundreds of tutorials on a dizzying array of subjects. He found a course in Japan that would give him a good introduction to basic technology and was thrilled to be accepted. He returned to Sri Lanka with a laptop and a screen reading technology, both donated by the Japanese.
He returned to his online studies with renewed enthusiasm – “I can say 99% of what I learned, I learned from the internet.” In 2008, he decided to apply to Colombo University and came on board not only as a student but also as a temporary instructor. A course at the Colombo School of Computing introduced him to JAVA and software development. “Designing small computer programmes, I realised that it was not that big a task.” However, he still struggled with interfaces and processes designed for normal sighted users. Relying heavily on his memory and working closely with his co-developer Him Prasad Gautam, he finally succeeded in writing Sinhala Bhaashakaya_120, a synthesized text-to- speech program.
He now demonstrates how it works, his fingers moving fluidly across the keyboard as a robotic voice lets him know the words he’s spelling out, letter by letter, and then reads the whole thing back in one go. In a note, Ashoka explains: ‘The main objective of this product is to mainstream the visually impaired Sinhalese community by enabling them in typing, reading, and accessing computer in Sinhala on an equal footing with their sighted native fellows.’ It currently supports many screen readers including Jaws, NVDA and Window-Eyes and produces audio files from text files. Users can choose between five male and four female voices, each with a different tone. Ashoka has specified that any visually impaired persons or related agencies can access or distribute the software for free.
Ashoka is currently in the process of building a digital library for the visually impaired that they can access through Sinhala Bhaashakaya_120. He sees these as preferable to generating Braille books which are time consuming and difficult to produce, sometimes ending up twice or even thrice the size of the original script. “Now we are in an effort to make Epubs (an e-book format) and audio books, which will finally help students,” says Ashoka. They work equally well for people with different degrees of blindness and will prove useful to regulars users as well. He seems most pleased though that visually impaired students will benefit. “Using this software I can study, everyone can study.”