​​Centre for Internet and Society​

Bangalore, India, 2013, April 25​

The International Girls in ICT Day is an initiative backed by the International Telecommunic-ations Union (ITU) and their member states to create a global environment that empowers and encourages girls and young women to consider careers and actions in the growing feld of information and communication technologies (ICTs). International Girls in ICT Day is celebrated on the 4th Thursday in April every year since 2010.

This year the CIS, having recently become a sector member of ITU-D, hosted a Bangalore Girls in ICT Day on the 25th of April at the Mitra Jyothi trust, which uses information and communication tech-nologies to empower the visually impaired and help them integrate into mainstream society. As ICTs are an important tool for personal empowerment, it was in the CIS and ITUs interest to include people with disabilities on Girls in ICT Day and hence holding the event at a centre which inspires peoplewith visual impairments was an important step towards including girls in the ICT sector in India, where according to a Times of India article, resides the worlds largest blind population 1. Nirmita Narasimhan of the CIS invited Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, a Social Media expert at the CIS, to have a talk, reaching out to the visually impaired girls at Mitra Jyothi and encouraging them to use ICT.

Around 30 to 40 visually impaired girls and boys came to listen to Dr. U.B. Pavanaja explain-ing the possibilities of using ICT with a visual disability in India. With Kannada being the loc-al language in Karnataka, and hence in Bangalore, the focus was put upon applications available in Kannada and the talk, too, was held in a mix of English and Kannada.

Afer an introductory round, in which the founder and managing trustee Ms Madhu Sing-hal spoke out her thanks to Nirmita Narasim-han for organizing the event, as well as to Dr. Pavanaja, for taking the time to speak, one of the girls opened the event with an inaugural song.

Following that Dr. Pavanaja began his speech with a brief history of font technology, focussing on the problems and incompatibil-ities the Kannada language faced in the development of new applications for the visually impaired. A short non-representat-ive survey he had made before, lef him with the general feeling that girls use ICT mostly to simplify daily procedures like shop-ping, banking and communicating. Most of the websites men-tioned were not accessible to the visually impaired, which ex-plains the reason many members of the audience were un-aware of these every day online experiences. He went on to in-troduce the audience to important apps and gadgets, which make using ICT easier for the visually impaired, some of which are also available in Kannada. This

included GPS bracelets and walking sticks, braille displays and live-scribe Echo pens, as well as apps like Fightback, which can be especially useful for women when confronted with a violent attacker or similar.

As the girls and boys in the audience had little or no experi-ence with digital media and ICT, the talk gave insight on sev-eral ways of using ICT, which were previously unknown to the listeners. Several questions included fnding the right operat-ing system for the visually impaired, as some already have in-tegrated audio prompt programs, while others require an ad-ditional installation. Also, the audience took interest in fonts with which Kannada voice prompts could most easily be im-plemented. Additionally, the discussion revolved around important ICT accessibility tools, standards and technologiesAttentive listeners at the final Q&A such as the importance of Unicode for regional languages,round text to speech in Kannada language and available inbuilt and third party screen reading sofware which come with different mobile phones and operating systems on computers.

The gender balance was more or less equal, although the male members of the audience seemed to participate more in asking questions. This may refect different attudes to-wards ICT according to gender conceptions. However, it is important to remember that the male members of society have to play their part in the path to inclusion, being actors of change in empowering girls and women to use ICT. The exchange was vital and several of the girls stated in the following informal round that the talk had opened them towards us-ing ICT in spite of their visual impairment. As their two-month training in ICT had just star - ted a week earlier, Dr. Pavanaja's talk gave the listeners an opportunity to get to know in-formation technologies, which they would then be able to explore further within their fol-lowing time of training.

The CIS thanks Mitra Jyothi for the valuable cooperation and will continue to work on inclu-sion for girls and the visually impaired in ICT, hopefully hosting another successful Girls in ICT Day in 2014.

1    See Times of India issue Oct. 11th 2007: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2007-10-11/india/27977420_1_...​

Additional document: girls_in_ict_report_cis India_2 2013.pdf