The World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2018 estimated that there are at least 63 million people in India who live with significant hearing loss. There still exists a massive gap between deaf people and education.
Bleetech Innovations, a Pune-based start-up, is attempting to bridge this gap using two technological interventions.
The first is BleeTV, a free android app and web portal that hosts a vast pool of content in Indian Sign Language (ISL), and the second is BleeTV Library—a similar platform that curates content for children.
Bleetech was started in 2015 by Janhavi Joshi and Nupur Kirloskar, while they were still studying product design at MIT, Pune.
“We worked on a project where we designed a smartwatch, that would help the deaf community ‘listen’ to music through vibrations,” says Janhavi.
However, over the course of their interaction with the members of the community, they understood the hurdles people with hearing impairment face in the process of gaining an education.
“Apart from a few exceptions, all schools for the deaf in India focus on oralism, using speech therapy and lip-reading for communication,” she adds.
“They end up relying heavily on textbooks designed for their peers, who do not have hearing issues, which in turn leaves them struggling to understand and reproduce the texts. As a result, most of them have underdeveloped linguistic skills,” she says.
The content on BleeTV are videos with topics ranging from news, financial literacy, current affairs, moral stories, English language, science and technology, and self-help, among others. The platform has reached over 12,000 deaf people, including 1,200 children, and has trained over 100 teachers.
This is really helpful for deaf people around to eliminate the gap between deaf people and education.
our CherishStory teams really appreciates them and wish them good luck.
follow @cherishstory on social sites.
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source : thebetterindia
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