All Children Reading – Bookshare

The Challenge

In many countries, students who are blind or have other print disabilities face formidable barriers as they pursue their education in the midst of a widespread book famine. In countries with several regional languages, such as India, even when a child with a print disability does receive an accessible text, it is the bare minimum to participate in class—with little or no reading materials to strengthen their learning outside the classroom, and few opportunities to complement their braille learning with other modes, such as audio. Preliminary data from schools for the blind shows very low levels of early grade reading skills, ranging between 10-15%.

Overview and Objectives

URC provided M&E support to Benetech for a literacy innovation using text-to- speech (TTS) project focused on mother-tongue materials for children with disabilities in Maharashtra, India. Students in the developing world who are disabled as a result of blindness or visual impairment (BVI) face many obstacles, the foremost of which is a severe dearth of educational materials in formats that are accessible to them. This project provided accessible audio books in mother-tongue, paired with the most current braille-focused reading methods. The project is funded through the Australian Aid, USAID, and World Vision International supported “All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development” initiative.

Benetech implemented a two-year pilot project to provide visually impaired students in Maharashtra, India, with mother tongue instruction and reading materials through Bookshare, Benetech’s digital library of accessible books. The project offered age-appropriate, high-interest books in Marathi in both human-narrated audio and hard-copy braille to students in three schools for the blind. This allows students to benefit from a multimodal approach to learning early reading skills, while ensuring that they receive a strong foundation in braille literacy and an early familiarity with assistive technology for educational purposes. URC provided support in monitoring and evaluation (M&E), including implementation of the early grade reading assessment (EGRA) tool.

Achievements

• Undertook the necessary design and development work to ingest, host, and distribute human narrated audio content in Marathi
• Partnered with three schools for the blind in Maharashtra to pilot offering comprehensive Bookshare services to their primary school students
• Delivered a curated collection of locally relevant human narrated audio books, along with braille created from text files