The Problem

Knowledge should be available to everyone equally. But when it comes to the disabled, that is hardly ever true. We set out to make things better, improving accessibilty to books- the most reliable source of knowledge.

The visually impaired can read books in two major ways- Braille copies or the newer option of using a screen reader for ebooks. But when it comes to Hindi, the former is hardly available, and most of the online content for the latter is unusable. Why is this? Let me explain. 

Almost all Hindi books published in print and subsequently online were written long ago, and have had few changes since. This was before the 1990s, a time when global computational resources were still developing, and the now universal Unicode format was far from complete. Back then, it had very few characters inbuilt, and definitely not Devnagri, the Hindi script. But books still needed to be published and printed, so the Indians used something of a quick-fix, which was knows as a non-Unicode font. The problem with this was that even though it looks and reads exactly like Hindi, its actually written in Roman characters at its back-end. Now this poses a serious problem. When we use our trusted screen readers on this non-unicde Hindi, it reads the characters written at the back-end, which is pure gibbersih. 

Front-End

स्वतंत्रता प्राप्ति के बाद विभिन्न विकसित राष्ट्रों के साथ विविध आयामी संपर्कों के बढ़ने से हिंदी साहित्य में नए-नए तत्त्व एवं तथ्य प्रविष्ट हुए।

Back-End

Lora=krk izkfIr Dsd ckn fofHkUu foDdflr jk"VQksa Dsd lkFk fofo/k vk;kkeh laiDdks¢ Dsd c<+us ls fganh lkfgR;k esa u,-u, rÁ~o ,oa rF;k izfo"V gq,` blls x|'kSyh ,oa x| fo/kkvksa Ddk rhozrk Dsd lkFk foDdkl g

( It looks like a mouse ran accross your keboard :P )

Almost all school boards - CBSE, Rajasthan board, CG board etc had their books written in the non-Unicode format.
Then came the 1990s, and the new and improved version of Unicode was introduced, which included characters for almost every script in existence, including Devnagri. And now, screen readers became capable of reading these texts smoothly. But, Indian publishers, as lazy as they are, weren't going to write new books just to facilitate a minor section of the society. So, we took upon this task of converting the fonts used in these books to Unicode, so that these books could be used for automatic reading.