Project concept note for development of Screen Reading software:
Summary Points:





Screen Reading software is THE MOST CRITICAL assistive technology required for education
and employment of persons with blindness or low vision.
Employer Company spends about Rs. 60000 for purchase of screen reading software for
every employee with blindness working in the company. The company also pays Rs. 5000
per year per employee for its upgrade.
NVDA is open source screen reading software developed by a team in Australia. We need a
development team for NVDA to make NVDA work as good as the expensive screen reading
software.
Indian Development team for NVDA will also make it better option for India by providing
high level technical support and building in support for Indian Languages in NVDA.
We need two experienced developers, two testers and project monitoring team for this
project.
PROJECT CONCEPT NOTE
A screen reading software is most critical assistive technology tool for persons with blindness or low
vision. This software enables a person with blindness or low vision to use the computer for all
reading and writing needs. This accessibility is extremely essential for enabling persons with
blindness to read their text books, write their examinations, work in normal office environment etc.
There are Several screen reading software developed by companies situated in USA and UK Most of
these software are extremely expensive. Most popular screen reading software costs about 50000
Rupees for a single user license. This means that if any company need to employee with blindness in
their office, they or the end user will need to spend 50 to 60 thousand rupees in addition to the
normal office equipment for this employee. Moreover, this cost is not just one time cost. Cost of an
upgrade itself is about 10000 rupees which need to be paid every year or in two years.
None of these screen reading software work well with Indian Languages. Which means that students
and employees wanting to work in Indian languages will remain dependent on others for all their
reading and writing needs.
The screen reading solution in Indian Languages need some special features which are not available
in any existing software including THE MOST EXPENSIVE ONES. For example, facility to deal with
bilingual documents where more than one languages are there in single document and different
Text to Speech Engine are to be used to speak different Languages. Special features are to be built in
screen reading software to deal with such situations.
There are several keyboard layouts for typing Indian languages. Most of these keyboard layouts are
built in a way that screen reading software are not able to speak when letters are typed. Thus efforts
are required to make various keyboard layouts of Indian Languages work with NVDA.
A Screen Reading software is required to be configured with special user interfaces used in job
environments such as the banking software used in a particular bank or UI of the application being
used in any specific BPO process. This is extremely essential for employability of persons with vision
impairment for a specific job process.
We certainly require high level technical support for a critical application such as the screen reading
software in India to deal with its compatibility with multiple Indian Language speech output,
multiple keyboard layouts and multiple fonts for every Indian Language Script. This support and
development effort is also required to deal with new feature request and removal of bugs in screen
reading software which have high priority for our conditions and may not be high priority for English
Language solution. For example, dealing with Unicode based content and Right To Left writing
support for Languages such as Urdu.
SOLUTION
Two Developers in Australia developed an open source screen reading software called NVDA that
works on Microsoft Windows operating system. This opens up new possibilities for persons with
blindness or low vision. However, NVDA has some limitations in comparison to the high cost
commercial solutions. Although these limitations are not too big but it requires more development
effort to bridge this gap and to keep the software compatible with new releases of operating system
and application software.
We need a dedicated team for NVDA development in India to address issue raised above. This team
would work in close collaboration with the International NVDA development team. We have
established contacts with the product Manager of NVDA and they are very willing for any such
collaborative effort.
Estimated Resource requirement:
1. A full time developer with more than five year experience of working on screen reading
software who has complete understanding about how persons with blindness use
computers with speech output interface. Approximate cost is Rs. 12 Lakh per year.
2. One full time developer who would work with main developer: approximate cost: Rs. 8 Lakh
per year
3. Two full time testers at approximate cost of Rs. 3 Lakh per tester
4. SDK and 1000 licenses of Indian Language TTS at approximate cost of 20 Lakh.
5. Four laptops
6. Overall management of the Project and software specifications.
Screen Reading software development is not a onetime effort but an on-going project as
compatibility is to be built with new releases of operating system and application software. We will
need to support this development for at least three years.
For further sustenance of this project, we will create an India specific distribution of NVDA
bundled with high quality paid versions of Indian Language TTS. We will be able to provide this
software at a cost which will be able to sustain the future development of this software.
A company has commitment to hire persons with blindness in their work team. Thus, in any case the
company will have to pay the cost of purchasing screen reading software for its employees with
blindness or low vision. Instead, company could invest in support and development of NVDA. It
would not only be a long term saving for the company, but also benefit persons with blindness
specially in developing countries who cannot afford to purchase high cost screen reading software.
Approach
We have two options of taking this project forward:
Option 1: This activity is taken as joint project of more than one companies. In such case
different companies will need to hire developers, testers and consultants and commit them
for project management and monitoring. Saksham Trust in Delhi can Drive this Project in
collaboration with other partner organisations.
SPECIAL NOTE
Specialised development human resource is required for application such as screen reading
software. Fortunately, we have such resource available in India who is willing to work on this project.
Financial support to this project at this time can help us to engage this human resource for this
critical project.