BlindFeed

Globally, over 2.2 billion people suffer vision impairments, and a significant number of child blindness in developing countries making the situation worse in education. Due to the lack of resources and cost of braille system conversions, a higher percentage of blind students have to leave education in the early stages. Technically there are some text-to-speech solutions but less native language support and a higher variety of languages in developing countries making this problem continue. As a solution, BlindFeed is a crowdsourcing web application platform that breaks a given book into short paragraphs and converts it into an audio format with voice donations from the crowd. This audio file will be freely accessible for blind people through a BlindFeed mobile app developed for visually impaired people. This will be a globally scalable application and that will help to reduce knowledge accessible difficulties for blind people in the world. 

Globally, over 2.2 billion people suffer vision impairments, and a significant number of child blindness in developing countries making the situation worse in education. Due to the lack of resources and cost of braille system conversions, a higher percentage of blind students have to leave education in the early stages. How we can reduce the knowledge accessibility difficulties for visually impaired people and make their life better. 

BlindFeed is a crowdsourcing web application platform that breaks a given book into short paragraphs and converts it into an audio format with voice donations from the crowd. This audio file will be freely accessible for blind people through a BlindFeed mobile app developed for visually impaired people. This will be a globally scalable application and that will help to reduce knowledge accessible difficulties for blind people in the world. 

Visually impaired students are the key beneficial group in this solution and beyond that one, anyone who has reading difficulties and needs to use books in audio formats can get advantages in this mechanism. All the converted books are freely available through the mobile app under the author's permission. On the other hand, people are really sensitive in this matter and they are willing to support these blind people. In that sense, this would be a good platform for connecting those two parties in a meaningful manner.

Problem: blindness a limitation to knowledge accessibility. Braille formats or TTS don't work in the context of 3rd world countries due to the cost, lack of resources, language diversity. Globally blindness ratio nearly 5:1, five people can support one in this matter. 

Technical Solution: A crowdsource web application that breaks a given book into small paragraphs and converts it into an audio format based on users' voice donations.  Recordings validation also handle in crowdsource manner. When we have completely validated the audiobook, it will push into the mobile app that is specially developed for visually impaired people.

Technically we are in the POC level and we already did some minor testing rounds with a small team. However due to some financial and resource limitations we have to delay our plans. Approximately we will be able to come to the first alpha release within a one month when we have good enough potentials. Regarding the mobile application we are a little bit behind and that can move into fast forward track when we reach out initial production deployment.

Adaptability: In technical terms, this key problem can be resolved based on modern text to speech models, but the key limitation is how that solution adaptable for a higher language diversity context. Because text to speech is a very expensive and data-hungry mechanism. In that sense, our core innovative solution comes up on the ground level and closely interacts with people. In the future, we can provide these data sets to improve text to speech capabilities of those languages too. 

Scalability: According to the higher technical adaptability we can introduce this solution for different regions, countries with a minimum modification. 

In practical situations, most of the related technical solutions are replacing languages from another as a solution for this matter. But that would be a cultural and social issue. However, as a solution, we always respect that language diversity and move forward with that one facilitating each and every language with its own crowd support.

In this movement, the solution is on the POC level and we are working on moving into the production level as soon as possible. In that sense, there are no significant users now and our plan is to support nearly 1 million blind peoples in Sri Lanka with the support of over 10 Million daily internet users within the next 5 years.

After we move up with the initial release, we will keep maintaining that source code base and continuously upgrade the systems under the rapid application development methodologies. Technically that is one way we can see our progress under the technical domain. Meantime we are doing progress analysis on operations based on some key factors such as user involvements, system usage, use contributions and etc. 

two full-time staff and three part-time staff working as software engineers to develop this solution. 

We have 3 engineers with over 5 years of industrial experience including myself. I'm leading this project and I have almost 6+ years of industrial experience with BSc and MSc degrees in the computer science domain. All of our computer science graduated engineers and we have newly joined one undergraduate student and recently graduated software engineer too.  

Mainly we are following a rapid application development strategy with the best use of the agile approch. In that sense, everyone has a very clear idea about the project, status, goals, and next immediate steps. When we come to the development team, all of us have similar opportunities to contribute to the main source code and highly use pair programming and iterate approach to move people within the allocated tasks.   

We have some sensitive experience with our visually impaired colleagues at the university and how they are suffering from reading books. We did some research on that issue and we identified that the problem is getting worse in the school education system. As technical people, we are trying to resolve this issue from our end and BlindFeed is the most precious solution we found after several years of research. At the movement, we are working on this solution but that may not be good enough to make it real. For that purpose, we thought that SOLVE would be a great opportunity to make our dreams come true and facilitate for visually impaired peoples to overcome their barriers.

Under the context of refugees, even major countries are facing similar difficulties on how to facilitate for these people with their own languages. In that sense, Our solution would be capable to support them in a meaningful manner with the voice contribution of their own people. Especially that will help to improve the educational level of refugees and make them valid entities of the country. 

With the context of an open solution for a smart, safe, and sustainable community, BlindFeed would act as the main part in making STEM education more accessible and equitable by empowering visually impaired people and consider them in an equal manner with the support of other people. We believe that the best way to empower the community is to give them equal opportunities to reach their own goals.