NVDA & eSpeak Team Members

by Prasad Krishna — last modified Jan 22, 2015 01:13 AM

Listed below are profiles of the team members working on the NVDA and eSpeak project.

NVDA Team Members

Dipendra Manocha

Dipendra Manocha is working with the DAISY Consortium which is working in the area of providing publications in accessible formats to persons who cannot read normal print. He is the lead of training and technical support and coordinates DAISY Consortium’s projects in developing countries. He is member of the Executive Committee of the World Blind Union and is managing trustee of Saksham. He is the president of the DAISY Forum of India which is a network of 92 organisations in India serving the persons with blindness and low vision. .

Since 1993, he has been working for the mission of providing technology solutions to limit the limitations of persons with blindness. Key areas of his contribution include computer training to open new areas in education and employment, Indian Language braille translation and screen reading software, DAISY standards for production and distribution of digital talking, braille and e-text books in South Asian Countries.

Awards

National Award by Government of India
Lakshmipat Singhania National Leadership award by IIM Lucknow
IBN-7 Super Idal award
Sitaram Jindal Foundation award

Manish Aggarwal

Manish has over 14 years of extensive software industry experience successfully leading large teams to design and implement complex business-critical information technology solutions. In his last 12 years at Sapient, Manish has worked for various clients in the Automotive, Healthcare, finance and Insurance industries. Manish also works with CIS on the open source NVDA screen reader project. The purpose of this project is to improve the free NVDA screen reader considering the specific requirements of Indian users and Indian language speaking blind users.

Siddharth Gupta

Siddharth strives to make a difference to the lives of the Visually Impaired persons by making data and information accessible to them. In NVDA, he has made contribution towards Indian Language Phonetics , Unicode Symbols like Mathematical Symbols, Symbols used in Physics, Chemistry, Emoticons and other frequently used Symbols. He has also tried to improve the accessibility of MS Excel. Siddhartha hails from Uttarakhand. He is a graduate in Computer Science Engg. Currently, he is a Project Associate at IIT Delhi. Prior to this, he was SAP ABAP developer at Infosys.

Dinesh Kaushal

Dinesh is currently working for the development of NVDA, an open source screen reader. He has more than 10 year’s experience in assistive technology development and accessibility implementation. Dinesh pioneered development of Hindi screen reader in India allowing persons with blindness to read / write in Hindi independently. He also spearheaded Braille development for Mobile devices for Code Factory and helped many people with blindness all over the world to communicate with other people without significant barriers. Dinesh successfully lead more than 100 accessibility projects in Wipro and helped Wipro win many awards including National Award for the best accessible website.

Suman Dogra

Suman Dogra has experience in accessibility testing on various accessibility products such as screen reader, PACMate, Open Book, MAGic etc. She has involved in non-profit management working in teams to provide various facilities related to technologies and employment to the differently abled persons. In NVDA project, she is involved in testing, training and coordinating the language testing.

eSpeak Team Members

Mahesh Inder Singh Khosla

Mahesh is a resident of Punjab, heading the Digitizing Programme for the Reference Library with Punjab Government. His deep interest in language and technology made him study Masters in Punjabi and to understand the ancient language base he studied Religious scriptures and did his Masters in Religious Science too. Having lost his vision at an early age Mahesh had to struggle hard to learn computers. He has created Punjabi Unicode based Keyboard Layout for the benefit of his community. With all his acquired knowledge on languages and strong technical interest, he worked on Punjabi TTS and in the year 2013, joined as a developer in CIS to contribute in the development of other Indian languages. He is now working on Gujarati, Marathi, Kashmiri and Kannada. He is making the software named espeak for Indian languages for the whole team and its users. Apart from language development and building the programme, he is giving technical support to the language team and is also involved in managing the bug tracking system.

Mahesh is an active Social Worker. He is the Secretary of Navchetna Institute for the Blind which is working to support visually challenged children providing free boarding and lodging along with free education. He is also the Chief Organising Secretary of Welfare Association for the Visually Challenged Employees giving technical support for the benefit of the visually challenged employees so that they are able to perform well in their workplace. He has been honoured by a lot of local Societies for his contribution in different fields. (Lions Club, Dedicated Brothers, Rainbow Club, Triveni, Sahitya kalash, Bharat Netraheen Samaj, Welfare Association for the Visually Challenged Employees).

Prasenjit Sen

Prasenjit is associated with Mahiti. He has 20 years of experience. He manages many projects. Mahiti has worked with numerous organisations since 1998 making a social impact from local to global level. To support them, Mahiti has produced websites, web portals, mobile applications, management information systems, print and online communication material including appeals and short films. Mahiti.org is integrated with Mahiti Infotech that's known to provide end-to-end IT solutions to businesses around the world. Together Mahiti a group of 50+ technocrats and sociologists committed to support social change through imaginative use of technology and creative communication.

Mahiti is strong advocate of principles for free and open source and it actively contributes to the FOSS movement.

Dr. Homiyar Mobedji

Dr. Homiyar is the CEO of National Association for the Blind, New Delhi. He is the training coordinator for NVDA project. He has extensive experience in the non government social work sector. He has worked for Enable India Bangalore, Technical Training Institute of the Pune and Blind Men’s Association, Gujarat. He also worked for physiotherapy college for the blind, Mumbai.