kochi visually challenged individuals in kerala for whom computer use and online accessibility remains a major impediment can now look forward to a better future under the technology development for indian languages programme tdil the union information technology ministry has developed a texttospeech software the software which is available in malayalam has been integrated with non visual desktop access nvda screen reader and optical character recognition system ocra to ease access and it is available free of cost k g sulochana associate director language technology centre cdac thiruvananthapuram who was part of the consortium that developed the software said it took two years to fine tune the governmentaided project the basic framework of the software which is available in malayalam tamil telugu marathi and bangla is the same and the only difference was made while feeding in the respective languages the voices of all the malayalam alphabets were first recorded and were matched with the corresponding text through the text to speech software tts following this we trained 30 visually challenged people and gave it to them to test its capability based on their feedback we made some modifications and now its available free of cost she said she pointed out that the software can be used both in systems running windows and linux and can be used to read almost all programs including documents spread sheets and website content those who require the software just need to submit a request by email to supportttslantanatenetresin k sathyaseelan teacher kasargod government blind school who recently tested the software is a happy man i have used many tts softwares and nothing has the speech output as this one it is user friendly but a little bit heavy and could pose difficulty in the initial stages for a user however the cdac has assured us they are working on some modifications based on feedback and would release a lighter version soon he said the basic framework of the software is available in malayalam we trained 30 visually challenged people and gave it to them to test its capability