‘Katha Karamu’ – App to aid communication out today
“Without the ability to communicate or the ability to speak, my life was a wasteland – I was living in a silent abyss. My life changed when I got the ability to talk this way – now we are able to give that ability to others,” says co-founder and co-president of the EASE Foundation, Chandima Rajapatirana on the launch of ‘Katha Karamu’, a Sinhala language mobile App designed to help non-speaking individuals to communicate.
For the past 16 years, Chandima, along with his mother and co-founder of the EASE Foundation, Anoja Rajapatirana, have been working to ‘ease the life of people with disabilities’. Diagnosed with autism at the age of four, Chandima shared that his vision is centred on “productive stimulating lives for people with disabilities”. Adds his greatest ally, his mother Anoja, “Our mission is to execute his vision.”
This Sunday, the 22nd of January the Foundation will be launching ‘Katha Karamu’ at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute. The App was developed in collaboration with software development company, Yaala Labs. Anoja shared that the seed for this particular App has roots tracing back to her time living in the USA with her husband. Working as a Library Assistant in Minnesota during the 1970’s, Anoja was recruited to teach University students how to speak Sinhala. Anoja developed a chart with the Sinhala alphabet arranged in a particular pattern to help students to learn how to read the language easily.
Following the family’s return to Sri Lanka in 2007, the EASE Foundation was established. During this time, Anoja endeavoured to teach Chandima how to communicate in Sinhala. Chandima, who after 18 years of silence, had learned to communicate in English through a technique known as Facilitated Communication whereby a communication partner (facilitator) supports a non-verbal or minimally verbal person (facilitated communication user) to express themselves by pointing to letters on a laptop or an alphabet board. Using the original chart she created to teach her students in Minnesota, Anoja shared that she was able to condense it into a more compact alphabet board to help Chandima to learn how to communicate in Sinhala. Since the Foundation first opened its doors, the students have been utilizing the same compact alphabet board to express themselves.
During a visit to the Foundation’s Education Centre in August of last year, Chief Architect at Yaala Labs Manoj Bandara, observed one of the Foundation’s students using the compressed alphabet and suggested making an app centred on it. Anoja shared that more features were later added to the app in order to help aid members of the deaf community as well. She explained that while many hearing-impaired individuals are able to visually interpret the movements of the lips through lip reading, the onset of the pandemic made this challenging when face masks were used to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
After conveying this concern to Senior Technical Lead at Yaala Labs, Dhananjaya Rajasinghe, the developers included a function which converts speech automatically into text. Anoja adds that the App also makes it easier for communication partners or facilitators as entire sentences can be typed out, saved and displayed on screen.
The ‘Katha Karamu’ App will be available for download for free on Google Play Store for Android devices.
For more information, visit the EASE Foundation website: www.easesrilanka.org
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