Parliament portal to be disabled-friendly

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The Indian Parliament website would soon become disabled-friendly, thanks to a text-to-speech technology to be provided by IBM.

IBM is facilitating to make the portal disabled-friendly, by licensing the technology through the government-owned Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

“IBM has licensed the text-to-speech (TTS) technology through C-DAC for enabling the Indian parliament website. The TTS will be first available in English and is to be extended to other Indian languages starting with Hindi,” a highly-placed IBM official told CyberMedia News.

“The TTS technology has been developed at the India Research Labs of IBM in Delhi and is to be integrated with other applications such as WordPad, text pad, spreadsheets and email clients,” the official informed.

The TTS technology code named - Shrutlekhan-Rajbhasha is part of IBM and C-DAC’s joint research project MANTRA-Rajbhasha.

The joint research project will also ensure accuracy in translation from English to Hindi the domain of administration, finance, agriculture and small-scale industry. The Department of Official Language, under the Home Ministry, is sponsoring the project.