Alipi
aLipi -- God's own content
aLipi as a word means without-alphabet or text/print-impaired. How?
lipi means alphabet, letter, writing or script in Sanskrit. The "a" sound as a prefix is mostly used as negation in Sanskrit and many Indian languages.
“Alipi - God's own content", is an investigation into creating and managing locally relevant accessible content for communities, this is a web-accessibility project which allows users to re-narrate the Web pages or elements, and to access other users re-narrations. Thus it changes access to web-content in ways that are relevant for any user, but may be particularly useful to print-impaired users and others who are lost in translation.
In addition to the visually handicapped, the other significant part of the entire population, like the insufficiently literate are also a large target community in developing countries like India, for provisioning screen reading of content. However, This segment would benefit from a visually rich rendition of a site while "reading out" the content. And it is important to address this segment now, as they are likely to get access to the Internet via mobile devices.
The problem addressed by this project, is the issue of web-accessibility for the print-impaired in the Web 2.0 era. we introduce the idea of re-narration as the basis for ”designing for inclusion.” In this model a web page or even an element of a web is rewritten, i.e., re-narrated, to make it accessible to a target audience of users in a completely decentralized way. A simple way to formalize re-narration is, Transformation on web elements. Using this formalization, we indicate how re-narration is a way of realizing the social semantic web. Following this semantic social web [semsocweb]-like model, that adds a few tags to identify certain annotations as re-narrations, Identify the target community for the re-narration and also the original object that is being re-narrated. using a combination of url and xpaths, these web documents can then be indexed by services that aid the re-narration activities and the recommendation process to help choose the most suitable narration for an aLipi user.
Towards this is a11y.in - "re-narration Web". It is a generic Web-framework for developing and rendering narratives that assist in accessing Web-content across cultural boundaries. Re-narration Web is therefore about Web-accessibility for digital Inclusion or e-inclusion.
With main objectives being, to provide an open source accessibility standards-conforming Web 2.0 development platform for content and data management on the Web that reflects on experience of both visually handicapped and the rural/semi-literate.
alipi / a11y.in research and development is open source, and is seeking developers, narrators, designers and Internet interest groups to help with development, demonstration and formalization so that an effective consolidation of architecture, processes and recommendations can evolve over the next couple of years.
Try it! On a Firefox. alipi.us. Sites can also integrate it: See Alipi link on Raika BCP page
See ReNarrationAct for the showcase project associating the delivery of law relating to domestic workers on a mobile phone, through re-narrations.
August 2011 Janastu/Servelots report describes the development of alipi.
Current code-base, development status at Alipi git-hub
We mocked up how a web-site could be played as a slide-show here. The idea behind this slide-show is explained here.
We also took up minimum wages law for domestic workers as an use case scenario. With the help of lawyers and domestic workers we re-narrated the page. After re-narration it could be clearly seen that more domestic workers could understand the law better now.
Currently we have two mailing lists:
alipi-dev @ googlegroups.com for developers
alipi-users @ googlegroups.com for users
We also are live on #alipi at irc.freenode.net.
and some outdates. And some News clippings of Interest
