KATHMANDU, Aug 21: Now the visually challenged people in the country could comprehend Nepali printed materials independently using Nepali Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, which was launched here Monday amid a program. 

The software developed by two IT experts at the Kathmandu University (KU) for the Nepal Netra Joyti Sangh in financial support of the Australian government was launched by Australian Ambassador to Nepal, Peter Budd. 

At a program organized by Nepal Association of the Blind, Australian envoy Budd said that software as OCR would bring the visually impaired and blind people under the access of public information and would be useful in elevating their status. 

World Blind Union estimates that less than 1 % published works are accessible for visually impaired people in developing country like Nepal. 

Against this backdrop, President Ramesh Pokharel believed that software as such would ensure visually challenged persons' access to information. 

The software developed by Prof Dr Bal Krishna Bal and Nirajan Panta after their two years of intensive research offers blind and visually impaired people to scan printed text and then speak it back in synthetic speech or save it to a computer in aid of the speech synthesis application named Text to Speech (TTS). 

The software could prove a boon for the 95,000 blind population recorded in the country in the last census in ensuring their access to information and technology. RSS 

 
• nepali oct
 
• visually impaired