Text to Chat

At foss.in, I had the pleasure of meeting a man who is the director of a text-to-speech project at IIT-Bombay, one of the world's best universities. He is blind, or as he put it, “severely visually impaired.”

To one of his students, I was explaining this: “my friend who lives in Bangalore is trying ubuntu, but she's nervous about where to get help; she is afraid that if she asks the young geniuses who promote open source software in Bangalore, they will make fun of her because she is an older woman who doesn't know much . . . .”

“OH NO!” boomed in the blind professor, “that would never happen. WE ARE VERY NICE PEOPLE.”

“OK, thanks, so where can she get help,?” I asked.

“I will give you the number of Renuka Prasad – he is very helpful, and HE IS A VERY NICE PERSON!” he replied.

Then the blind professor pulled his phone out of his pocket, and began to shout at it, giving it instructions, like:

“RETRIEVE . . . . PHONE CONTACT . . . PRASAD . . . .”

Voila! He held his phone to me and there was the name Renuka Prasad, together with a phone number in a very small font size.

I squinted and got the first digit, then the backlight went out and the phone's screen went dark.

“Uhhhh,” I told the professor, “your backlight went out.”

“Just press the button,” he said,

So I took the phone and pressed the button, but I pressed the wrong button. Suddenly the phone was dialing. The professor understood, because of the noise, so he took the phone from my hand, and with the dexterity of someone who can solve Rubik's cube in 15 seconds, he whirled the phone around a few times, canceled the phone call, and there again was the phone number o Mr. Prasad, this time with the backlight permanently on.

“Uhhh, I can't read it, . . . my eyes are bad,” I said.

OOPS! I just said “my eyes are bad” to a blind man.

He didn't react. So I continued, “can you read it aloud to me?”

Again, he didn't react. But his student was there, and his student kindly read aloud the phone number, which I copied into my own phone. Then I thanked them and walked away.

Twice, I said something stupid, which the blind professor could have construed as an insult. But no, he was not insulted, instead he was just happy to be able to help and he graciously accepted my thanks. Because, as he said, WE ARE REALLY NICE PEOPLE!