Workshop on Computer Training Programme with Marathi Text-to-Speech System for Visually Challenged Persons from 15th June to 26th July 2011.

As part of TTS Consortium project, under the leadership of IIT Madras, C-DAC Mumbai has developed a Text-to-Speech Synthesis system for Marathi. Parallel systems have been developed for other Indian languages by member institutions of the consortium. These 6 Indian languages (Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam and Bengali) have now been integrated into NVDA and ORCA screen readers using open source based festival speech synthesis engine. It has been planned to conduct training programs for the Visually Challenged persons in the vernacular using NVDA and ORCA at different sites across India.

It is an honor for C-DAC, Mumbai to have the privilege to conduct this Workshop. This Workshop will be at CDAC Juhu from 15th June to 26th July 2011 on NVDA integrated with Marathi TTS. This course will be conducted by a competent Visually Challenged person for more than 30 students. Certificates will be provided at the end of the programme. There will be no fee for attending this workshop.

C-DAC Mumbai is primarily responsible for the vertical task of developing the system for Marathi. This project is sponsored by Department of Information Technology, MC&IT, Govt. of India and the members of this TTS consortium are:

• IIT Madras (co-ordination)
• C-DAC Mumbai
• C-DAC Thiruvananthapuram
• IIIT Hyderabad
• IIT Kharagpur
• STQC DIT

Marathi VC persons, for the first time, are going to have a screen reader for their language with a native Marathi voice. (Till date JAWS works for Hindi only and E-SPEAK for Hindi, Tamil and Kannada among Indian languages). They will be able to computer-read Marathi Unicode text, learn basic uses of computer, send mails in Marathi, read Marathi websites, etc.