Reading for the blind

I am because you are because we are. In a nutshell, “ubuntu”. A word of African origin which is now also the name of a project to help blind and visually impaired Bosnian students by providing books and text books in audio format online and free of charge.

Its name, Reading for Ubuntu, reflects the project’s underlying philosophy: a community that doesn’t care about the problems of the blind is its self a blind community. “There are approximately ten thousand blind and visually impaired people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a third of whom are students”, explains Fedja Kulenovic, Reading for Ubuntu’s 29 year old founder; “this is nothing compared to the number of blind people in India but they still have the right to accessible information”. 

Run entirely by volunteers, the Reading for Ubuntu website was launched on November 11. The British Council in Sarajevo provided the one thousand euro grant which enabled the volunteers to buy the domain and set up the website and no further funding is expected until next year, when the website will be re-launched with updates and applications encouraging greater connectivity between the users and the readers.

“The biggest challenge at first was to find a way of publishing online without infringing copyright laws,” says Kulenovic, “but thanks to the support from Bosnia’s national organisation for the blind, which is allowed to record audio books without paying copyrights, and by ensuring that only blind and visually impaired people access the site we are able to record and distribute copies of books in full respect of the law”.

When asked what pushed him to setting up the project in the first place, Kulenovic tells the story of a blind school friend who had to rely on her mother to read all her books to her. Wanting to lend a hand to his friend, Kulenovic promised to record himself studying out loud but he ended up not keeping his word. “This is my way of making up for that broken promise”. 

Read more: http://oneworldsee.org