To empower students with visual impairment, the National Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organisation (NATMO) is developing Braille maps in regional languages, starting with Bengali.
Headquartered in Calcutta, NATMO — a unit of the Union ministry of science and technology — is the premier thematic map and atlas-making organisation in the country. Two years ago, it had developed a Braille atlas in English and last year, it came up with its Hindi version.
“Most students are comfortable in their mother tongue. Therefore, it is necessary to have Braille maps in regional languages to facilitate geography education,” said Aniruddha Bhattacharya, scientific officer, NATMO.
The first volume of the atlas in English has 20 maps of India. The second volume has physical, political and administrative maps of all the continents.
“Now, we are developing atlases in 12 regional languages like Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Oriya,” added Bhattacharya. The idea of a Braille map was proposed at the first Technological Conference for the Visually Handicapped in 1997. The first map was crafted on metal and then on fibreglass. But the media were not user-friendly. The metal was too hard for fingers and the fibreglass was too heavy to carry around and store.
Currently, atlases are being printed on paper with screen-printing technology. They will be sent free to all the blind schools listed by the Union department of science and technology. “We have got a good response from all over India. The World Blind Union and the Asian Blind Union have also shown interest in the work we have done,” claimed Bhattacharya.
NATMO is also in the process of publishing an atlas for students with low vision. “Making the atlas for people with low vision is turning out to be more challenging because it is difficult to determine which colours they can see or which colour combination is most appealing to them,” said the scientific officer.
Eleven maps have been prepared and tested at Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission Blind Boys’ Academy and Society for the Visually Handicapped. “Some more testing needs to be done,” observed Bhattacharya.
