Mitra Jyothi used to create awareness by visiting Corporate offices, NGOs, and educational institutions. Unlike prior years the pandemic situation limited our field visit activities this year. However, this was the year we were able to do more via online platforms – awareness campaigns and training courses were conducted for 1000s of people.
Mitra Jyothi completed 30 years – remarkable journey. This year we had supported Loksabha elections by providing election booklets, guidelines and ballot papers in braille for almost all districts of Karnataka.
Few noteworthy value adds to our beneficiaries this year were: Mitra Jyothi’s Computer courses are NIIT Foundation certified since September 2018, started signature training for both Computer and Life skills training students since this was one area left unfocussed, Launched audio version of English-English-Kannada dictionary.
The most significant achievement of this year is the up gradation of the production of accessible books, we refer to this as Library Digitalization Process. As part of it, our staffs were trained to publish books in various accessible formats like e-text, e-Pub, Braille, DAISY and MP3 from a master base accessible copy.
This year marks the stabilization of the CEWD and the Braille Press! Printing school textbooks and other books to nurture the reading habit among the visually impaired by building Braille Libraries in selected schools, begins. This year also saw a new collaboration start with Bookshare and Sugamya Pustakalaya!
This was the year that brought the “Centre for Empowerment of Women with Disability” (CEWD) and our Braille Press to life! The construction of CEWD was completed and the facility was inaugurated in Dec 2015.