Report on Training in eSpeak Marathi
Delegates getting trained at the training programme held in Mumbai
Voice Vision conducted workshops on June 27 and 28, 2015 for persons with visual impairment in Mumbai. These workshops were in partnership of National Association for the Blind (NAB) Delhi which has been a pioneer in the spread of Assistive Technology for the blind and Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) Bengaluru which has been conducting the project for development of Indian Language support for eSpeak TTS (Text-to-Speech) which is bundled as the default TTS with NVDA (Non Visual Desktop Access). The workshops were held at SIES college of Arts, Science & Commerce, Sion, Mumbai.
The inauguration of the event was done by the Chief Guest from the social justice & special assistance ministry, Yashwant More, Regional Deputy Commissioner, Department of Social Welfare, Konkan Bhavan.
This was followed by the training session on NVDA which was conducted by the CEO of NAB Delhi himself, Dr. Homiyar Mobedji. It was a practical training session for the participants on how technology can be used for the non-visual access of computers. Dr. Homiyar and his team along with the zeal of the participants to learn about NVDA made it a wonderful session as recorded from the feedback received.
The NVDA training was followed by a lunch break. Post the lunch break there was a session on eSpeak TTS in Marathi language and was conducted by Harshad Jadhav, Marathi Tester for the eSpeak project.
A total of 34 people attended the workshop held on the June 27, 2015 at SIES college of Arts, Science & Commerce, Sion, Mumbai.
The workshop saw participation from people from every walk of life, students, job seekers, special educators and the like. More than 45% of the attendants were students and 12% of them were trainers in professional life.
Forty-nine per cent of the attendants said their overall experience with the workshop was excellent, 43 per cent said it was very good while 8 per cent of the attendants felt their overall experience to be good.
Sixty-three per cent believed that the workshop was highly helpful for them personally and professionally, while 37 per cent believed that the workshop was surely helpful somewhat suggesting that they were very much satisfied with the workshops.
A whopping 74 per cent of the respondents were highly impressed by the trainer and termed him ‘excellent’, 23 per cent said he was very good and 3% said he was good.
Ninety-one per cent of the respondents were overwhelmed by the quality of work put in by our volunteers and termed them ‘excellent’. Nine per cent said the volunteers were very good.
Fifty-one per cent people regarded the content material provided as excellent, 34 per cent said the material was very good whereas 15 per cent said it was good.
| Pictured above: Participants undergoing training in eSpeak Marathi at the workshop in Mumbai | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Learnings from the Workshop
Forty-two per cent of the respondents felt that the Marathi typing session which was conducted would immensely help them in their career and the overall response was that all the activities which happened in the workshops would help them in their profession.
Thirty-seven per cent of the respondents were satisfied with the workshop content and thought nothing more is required. Some other responses were directed towards need for more of such workshops as well as workshops in various other regional languages.
