Insight

Training was organised for the teachers of the Vazhuthacaud based Rotary Institute for Children in Need of Special Care at Insight centre, Murinjapalam on 18 January 2013. The trainees were Mrs. Renuka V.S., Mrs. Jino P.Jose and Mrs. Rani. Five sessions were were held as part of the training. In the first session, Mrs. Lethi gave an introduction to free software used at the centre and explained all the activities in GCompris. The second session was handled by Mrs. Kavitha and she covered Childsplay and PysyCache. Mrs. Sulekha dealt with KLettres, Tux typing and Tux Math. Mrs. Shilpa demonstrated the activities in starfall.com and Jacobs lesson.

SPACE conducted a two day workshop on “ICT for Children with Special needs” at the Dept. of Rehabilitation Science and Special Education, Holy Cross College, Tiruchirappalli on 10th & 11th January 2013. Around 20 post graduate students from the department attended the programme.
Mr. Rijoy and Mr. Deepuraj from SPACE introduced and explained ICT tools in free software which are used by the visually challenged and autistic students.

 SPACE made a presentation on “Assistive technologies for the visually challenged” at the 45th annual conference of Kerala Federation of the Blind. Mr Rijoy from SPACE talked about the latest free software based ICT technologies for the visually challenged. Android based mobile applications caught the special attention of the participants. The seminar was held at College of Commerce, Kannur on 30 December 2012. The conference was inaugurated by Mr. K. Sudhakaran, Member of Parliament at Jubilee Hall, Kannur. More than hundred visually challenged people from various districts of Kerala attended the session.

SPACE presented three papers at the national seminar 'Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Disability Management', organised by Centre for Disability Studies from 3-4 December 2012 at Kanakakunnu, Thiruvananthapuram. Mr. Rijoy .V, Mr. Deepu Raj and Ms. Nila Ethel presented the topics 'Text to Speech Synthesis & its Applications for the Visually Challenged', 'Assistive Technologies for the Differently Abled', 'Early Intervention Measures for Prevention of Visual Impairment' respectively.

SPACE organised an eight-day workshop for the Library staff of JNU on Assistive Technologies for the visually challenged from 8-15 September 2012. The main objective of the programme was to equip the Library staff as master trainers to assist the visually challenged to use computers. The entire workshop training module was based on free and open source software. A two day orientation programme intended to sensitize the visually challenged in free software based technologies was also conducted for
the students of JNU.