Inclusive Planet venture in India creates more accessible print materials through its Web site

From the Times of India:

CHENNAI, India -- The iPhone manual is one of the most downloaded documents on this site but bookbole.com isn't a tech site. It's a place for visually impaired and print-disabled people to connect and share books, journals, articles, user manuals and even class notes that have been converted into an accessible format.

The site was started on August 24 this year by Chennai-based copyright lawyer Rahul Cherian and his friends Sachin Malhan from Mumbai and Reuben Jacob from Kochi. It is one of the projects of their company, Inclusive Planet, which aims to create technology-led solutions to challenges faced by the differently-abled.

Bookbole.com allows the visually impaired to upload material that they've converted into formats that they can read'. It's a collaborative system which means people get to share information with each other, and can also make requests for books, notes, product manuals and more. So, if you're print disabled and need a particular book in a format you can access, you just have to leave a request on the site and one of its 2,000-odd members across 72 countries will probably have it and upload it for you, adding one more to the 15,000 files the site already has. (A person who cannot read printed matter because of a visual, physical, developmental or learning disability is called print disabled, so that would include the blind, autistic, people with cerebral palsy and even the elderly.)

Bookbole is aiming to add one million files by June 2010. Rahul, who is physically challenged, says, "No one else in the world has this kind of collaborative system." And the bookbole folks discovered this at a conference they attended recently in the US. "We were hoping to pick up tips from others doing this, but they told us there was nobody else," says Rahul, laughing.

NGOs that convert books into audio and other formats are also bookbole members. "We have a cataloguing system as we don't want people to replicate work. If a book's already in an accessible format, why should someone else spend time converting it when they can all just share?" says Rahul. Estimates by the World Blind Union put the number of print-disabled people in India between 40 million and 70 million, the largest in the world. "Bookbole's for them a vibrant community for the visually impaired to share useful material and engage in conversations," he says. They're also building a caregiver platform where parents of visually impaired children can connect.

Inclusive Planet is also working to develop an affordable reader a device cheaper than a computer on which they can access the site and run the software tehy need to read' that will take the site to every school in the country. They're also looking to make the site sustainable, which means they're aiming to get publishers on board as well. Chennai's Blaft Publications is among those who have signed up to have their books sold through the site. "Right now, there's a lot of educational material being uploaded. There's also a great demand for material in regional languages. We're hoping magazines and newspapers will eventually become accessible and we're planning separate channels for them," he says.