Some of the interns with an official at Mathru Educational Trust for the Blind, Bangalore.
DOHA: A group of students at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar and Pittsburgh are conducting technology research projects in India that benefit the visually-impaired.
Eight students are spending the summer in Bangalore after being selected to join the 2013 iSTEP (innovative Student Technology ExPerience) internship. Aveed Sheikh, a business administration student at CMU-Q and his fellow Pittsburgh teammates, Madeleine Clute, Maddie Gioffre, Poornima Kaniarasu, Aditya Kodkany, Vivek Nair, Shree Lakshmi Rao and Avia Weinstein, have moved to Bangalore for the summer months and are working in partnership with the Mathru Educational Trust for the Blind.
iSTEP is a summer research internship programme that provides the opportunity to conduct technology research projects in underserved communities around the world. The 2013 team is working on projects that support blind students learning Braille. They are further developing the software device connected to a computer that allows blind students to learn the placement of different dots in a Braille cell.
“It is a wonderful learning experience to work with a multi-talented international CMU-Q team to make a positive difference,” said Aveed Sheikh.
The trust includes the Mathru School for the Blind, a non-profit and voluntary institution founded in 2001 to educate and rehabilitate blind children and adults. In 2011, it launched a new centre educating children who are deaf and/or have multiple disabilities.
“Mathru is an inspirational partner, we have relished working with the staff dedicated to teaching differently-abled students,” said Lakshmi.
Blind students can also learn to write Braille through games and exercises using a slate and stylus. The device provides instant audio feedback based on the user’s input and corrects mistakes. The interns are working on enhancing existing modes on the Braille Writing Tutor software by introducing Kannada (local language) and Hindi Braille, in addition to maths.
In addition to software development, they have been working with the trust to conduct interviews, user experience tests, and analyse data to understand the technology’s impact. The Peninsula
