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Our inspiration is Arpit, a young boy with Cerebral Palsy, who would come running every
time I visited his school.
My name is Arun Mehta. I started to write the skid software so that Arpit and people
like him can communicate using a computer. We were amazed at how quickly Arpit learned
how to use skid and typed his own name.
The number of people who would benefit from such software is huge. Persons with mental
challenges, with serious communication issues constitute approximately 10% of the world's
population. There are however several varieties of mental challenges- dyslexia, autism, retardation,
cerebral palsy and different people have different abilities and disabilities and need to be
able to do different things. And so skid needed to develop quite rapidly
in a variety of different ways.
We also needed to get feedback from children with mental challenges to see how well the
software works for them. And we therefore did several workshops with children with autism.
They showed a lot of interest and learned very quickly.
Now that the basic skid platform and the first few modules were ready, we needed to bring
students in, so that a large number of modules to do different things could be developed
in short time. This also made it possible for us to offer skid completely free of cost
to the people who needed it; people who are often poor and have a hard time justifying
huge expenses.
In summer 2008, we organized hands-on training for students – 16 from JMIT, Radaur and
1 from Acharya Narendra Dev college University, who wrote modules for the skid software.
Modules were produced either by students alone, or in groups on 3 to 5.
Weekly classes were organized to help the students with their difficulties.
“I did my summer training with Dr. Arun Mehta. After learning Ruby on Rails, which
is a very easy language to learn by the way. I am able to code now on my own. Even a newcomer
in this field can really imbibe the Ruby coding and concepts of Ruby very easily.”
“I developed a simple application known as wikipedia search. It basically helps a
physically challenged student to get some information from the Internet.”
“We were taught everything properly. How project is worked? How it is planned? And
its really helpful in the current scenario since there aren't really any IT jobs available”
“I have done 4 modules in the skid software. The first one was crop; the second one was
picedit; the third one was the reflect module; and the fourth stepsize. Ruby on Rails is
a framework which allows us to do programming like the big programmers do their programmes,
like there are separate spaces for storing the view of the website.”
As a result of their summer work, the students developed modules so that disabled people
could access wikipedia, could post to bulletin boards, send emails, edit pictures, spell
etc.
The software was also made available by the website skid.org.in to users around the world,
and those modules developed by students had the names of the students also mentioned.
Skid was formally launched in October 2008 at the Indian International Center, New Delhi,
where the students demonstrated their modules in front of activists from the disability
sector, persons with disability, their caregivers, persons from government, media etc.
This was also the perfect occasion to honor the contribution that Arpit Khansili had made
to this project. He was our obvious choice for the first recipient of the Ed Roberts
Award, which will be given each year to a disabled person who makes outstanding contribution
to the area of computers for persons with disabilities.
We gave Arpit a notebook with the software pre-installed and a wheel so that together
he could independently write and do other things.
We are continuing our efforts to add new modules to skid. Towards this end we have started
free online training classes in Ruby on Rails for writing modules on the skid platform.
We would like to invite students from around the world, who would like to learn web programming
using Ruby on Rails to come join us and learn by adding modules to skid that will help children
with mental challenges communicate, learn and play.
Please contact us.
Thank you.