Reading without seeing

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The Employers’ Federation of Ceylon, together with the ILO office for Sri Lanka, Bookshare and Enable India, conducted the “Reading without seeing” experiential training in December 2018.

30 visually impaired participants got the opportunity to experience:

– Challenges of reading and writing;

– Effects of not being able to read and write;

– Solutions for reading and writing;

– Demonstration of modern technology;

– Hands on experience of using common tools for reading and writing.

Bookshare offers free memberships to all end users in Sri Lanka. This way, all books produced in Sri Lanka can be made available from this single platform on which more than 450,000 titles are available.

The Bookshare team visited Sri Lanka in December 2018 and partnered with The Employers’ Federation of Ceylon. Also, a training on e-book editing for 20 participants who have a passion in creating e-books in accessible formats for visually impaired persons and people with print disabilities was conducted in the same month.

Participants were trained on how to create e-books in English, Sinhala and Tamil languages. The participants were also trained on orientation skills of persons with visual and print disabilities for accessing the Bookshare system, granting free membership, membership roles and digital literacy.

With more and more titles being uploaded in more languages, Bookshare is the world’s most popular source of accessible reading resource for millions of print disabled individuals.