BanglaBraille wins The Bobs

BanglaBraille has won The Bobs in the Best Innovation category.

The Best of Online Activism 2014 in a media statement said Deutsche Welle, the sponsor of the competition, will present the award on June 30 as part of the Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany.

The Bobs is the world’s largest international Weblog competition.

More than a million people in Bangladesh are blind, the release said. There are no suitable textbooks for more than 50,000 children in the country.

After coming across a report on bdnews24.com in 2013 about there not being enough books for blind children, Ragib Hasan, then an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, launched a Facebook group to address the problem.

The group hit 400 members on the first day, he told bdnews24.com.

Over 2,000 volunteers of the project now work to digitise textbooks and create audio books and put them up on their website, www.banglabraille.org.

Celebrated author and educationist Prof Muhammad Zafar Iqbal was with this project from the very beginning, letting the project use his Braille printer to print out the books.

Ragib Hasan. File Photo

“The project has fundamentally improved the lives of many students in Bangladesh and is fighting against a problem that authorities in the country have criminally neglected,” said jury member Shahidul Alam of Bangladesh, according to the release.

Ragib Hassan said he hoped that this recognition will make people more aware and "bring us more volunteers”.

Photo blogger Mosa'ab Elshamy from Egypt received the “Best Blog” prize at this year’s Bobs.