Insight officialy launched

January 16, Thiruvananthapuram. INSIGHT, an ICT centre for differently abled made its official launching. Insight is an ambitious project aimed at addressing the lives of over 3 lakhs visually challenged people of Kerala. The Insight Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, a state of art training facility jointly set up by SPACE and Kerala State IT Mission, have already trained a team of 12 master trainers in this direction. Also over 50 visually challenged students from different schools of Thiruvananthapuram have learned at Insight in the past months. The Insight project is fully run on free software developed and customized by SPACE. It replaces costly proprietary softwares that otherwise cost 60 thousand rupees for each computer. The Insight project is first of this kind in India. The inauguration ceremony participated by chief officials from IT department, social welfare department and other well wishers and beneficiaries was held at Hotel Residency Tower. Dr.Ajay Kumar IAS, Secretary(IT), Government of Kerala presided over at the inauguration. The other officials who spoke at the function include: Sri.Saurabh Jain IAS, Director Kerala State IT mission; Dr.Usha Titus IAS,Secretary(Social Welfare); Sri.K.Anvar Sadath-Director,IT@School Project; Sri. D. Madhu- Dy.General Manager,SBI; Sri Joseph Mathew-Dy General Manager,SBT; Sri RamRao-G-TETCH, Technopark and Sri.Satish Babu, Executive Secretary ,SPACE. Insight is a technology aided project. The project aimed at improving the living conditions of the visually challenged through computers, internet and other ICT tools. Started in Thiruvananthapuram, in the coming years the project will extend out to other districts of Kerala. The project is planned to club with the wide network of Akshaya Cetres promoted by the IT department of Kerala. It is hoped that each Akshaya Centre will have at least one computer equipped to address the needs of visually challenged. The visually challenged trained at Insight Centre now easily use computers with an audio desktop interface powered by free softwares like ORCA and FESTIVAL. Development of a Malayalam Optical Character Recognition and Text to Speech System is progressing at a fast phase at SPACE, to solve the language barrier faced by many visually challenged in using computers. In the second phase of the project, Insight also plans to extend out to other vulnerable groups with physical handicaps and mental retardation. Department of Social Welfare has come forward to concretize the plan. At Insight we continue to change lives!