Udaan
 
The National Association for the Blind is the largest non-government organization working in the area of the education and rehabilitation of persons with blindness in India. One of the biggest challenges in education of persons with blindness is to make books available in Braille, e-text or audio format so that students could read books themselves. NAB, Delhi has two recordings studios - the only such kinds in India - dedicated to produce text books in a specially developed DAISY audio format for this purpose. Requirements for production of talking books are much larger than what they can produce through their own facility and Moserbaer Trust has joined hands with NAB to overcome this great challenge.
 
We first shared this concept with our employees and asked them to suggest a name for this initiative that they felt captured the spirit of empowerment, hope, enthusiasm and dynamism and we received a phenomenal response out of which the name 'Udaan' was chosen.
 
Many employees and their families volunteered to participate in the recording as well and were auditioned by NAB for this purpose. Keeping in mind the distance involved, Moser Baer has set up a recording studio at GN itself so that more employees and their families could volunteer and the idea has met with very enthusiastic response. Through this studio, text books for classes IX-XII would be recorded. The company has also designed and produced 40,000 CDs to be donated for this purpose and these CDs would be used under project Udaan by visually challenged children across India.
 
" The support extended by Moserbaer has been an important catalyst in the propagation of Digital Talking Books for the blind in India. With the assurance of Moserbaer organisations are not having to think about the book distribution expenses. This has helped in upgrading many libraries from the outdated analog cassettes distribution system to the modern digital technology. When a blind student gets his book in a CD, he is able to take advantage of accessible navigation facilities such as jumping directly to a page or sub section in the book. These features were not available in talking books which were distributed in audio cassettes". Prashant Ranjan Verma, Project Manager, National Association for the Blind