Visually impaired get talking books

ISTANBUL — The Assistive Technology and Education Laboratory for Individuals with Visual Disabilities (GETEM) operates under the Disability Center of Boğaziçi University. GETEM provides a reading area, library materials and free assistive services for Boğaziçi University students with disabilities, having a total of 31 students, 23 of whom are visually disabled.

The center also provides free online digital library services for over 4,500 individuals with disabilities across Turkey since 2006. The digital library project is aimed to reach nearly 400,000 individuals with visual disabilities, as well as other types of disabilities including reading disabilities and cerebral palsy. The services of the digital library project are delivered to individuals by municipalities, nongovernmental organizations and universities in Turkey.

The digital library includes mostly Turkish and English materials together with other languages such as German, French and Spanish. In addition to stories, novels and poems, teaching materials including books, articles, class notes and conference records are provided digitally. Those materials, totaling 8,500 audio books and 6,000 textbooks, are read aloud with either a human voice or computer voice.

The materials are used with special programs or with refreshable braille displays that turn the electronic text on the computer screen into braille. Those recordings can also be saved on CDs and MP3s to be listened to later.Books, articles and all other reading materials are read and recorded by volunteer students of Boğaziçi University. The first and most important criterion to be a volunteer is to enjoy reading.

People who speak with a stammer or speak in local accent of an area are preferred. Someone who wants to be a volunteer is given training by GETEM officials before they go into voice recording rooms. Today, there are nearly 1,000 volunteer readers, many of whom are dedicated. People who wish to benefit from these services must provide a medical report proving their disabilities. They are then given a username and a password, which enables them to access to online sources anywhere, anytime.

A psychology student with visual disabilities at Boğaziçi University said, "The existence of audio books makes our lives easier. For example, I had a psychology exam and I had only one day to study a 700-page course book. Thanks to the audio version of that book, I was able to study. GETEM provides both audio books and textbooks. Audio books are helpful but if you want to underline sentences or take notes, textbooks are more useful. When I was at high school, I didn't have the opportunity to read many books. However, when I entered Boğaziçi University, I could read almost 50 books ranging from Turkish literature to world classics in just a few months thanks to the digital library of GETEM."

Director of GETEM Engin Yılmaz said the digital library was created in cooperation with the National Library of Turkey, Six Points Association of the Blind and various high schools. "Some publishing houses send PDFs of their books to GETEM.

However, this is not enough. 300,000 books are published in a year but it is not possible for us to turn all of them into audio books due to our limited resources. An enterprise can't be carried out successfully with inadequate means. If every publishing house sends PDFs of their books to our digital library, every book will be easily accessible."

Yılmaz noted GETEM was not only made up of a digital library but it also attempted to develop new systems to make easier the lives of people with disabilities. He mentioned a recent GETEM innovation to help people in election times.

"Why do people with disabilities have to enter the polling booth and vote with a companion? Where is our secret ballot right?" complained Yılmaz. "To preserve our right, we developed a system in which there is no change on voting papers. We will use the same voting slips like anyone else but we will put voting slips in a punched card on which names of the parties are written in the braille alphabet. Thus, we will be able to figure out the places of the parties on the paper and vote easily. Then we will take the paper out of the card and put it into the ballot box in a closed letter without taking help from a companion. We would like the Supreme Election Committee to put our system into practice in the forthcoming presidential elections."