Audiobooks Campaign in Collaboration with Samarthanam

‘Philanthropy is not about money, it is about feeling the pain of others and caring enough about their needs to help ’

-Timothy Pina

Keeping this as our aim, the ISR club came up with yet another campaign which was planned specially for the students with sight impairment. The club launched an audiobooks campaign, wherein the members of the club took initiative to read out and record a book for children with visual impairments. This task was done in coordination with, and for, NGO Samarthanam during September 2021.

The aim was to make the impaired children feel more included and keep up with the world and never give up on learning because the usual methods by which they read require constant consultation which can often cause disruption in reading. There is usually a huge time gap between books being published in standard print and then being converted into either braille format or audio books. Moreover, only 2% of the total books published are accessible in the form of audio formats. Thus, leveraging assistive technology is very important in making tasks such as reading much more accessible and convenient for the visually impaired .

In order to record these audio notebooks, each volunteer was allotted a book of roughly 200-300 pages according to the recommendations made by the NGO and were given a span of 3 months to record it in an audio format through the advised software. The intent of this campaign was to provide visually impaired students with audiobooks by means of communication technology in order to expedite learning and to make their reading experience more congenial and effective.

Through this campaign, our volunteers were able to acquire more knowledge about assistive technology and how it is used to provide assistance to students with unique needs who wish to consume cultural products like textbooks but are unable to do so due to their impairments. Through this initiative, the Institute Social Responsibility was able to provide visually impaired students with audiobooks as an alternative to braille translations and contribute to and enhance their learning experience.

After the completion of the project a certificate of appreciation was given to all the volunteers involved in it.