What they especially needed was a Braille Malay-English dictionary, which students could refer to through physical touch. Yet nothing like this existed, either in Malaysia or in the surrounding region.
Inspired, Norazmi, who is head of the Special Education Programme at Universiti Kebangsaan (UKM)’s Faculty of Education, decided to do something about it.
Today, he and his team are developing the country’s first bilingual dictionary in Braille.
“We hope that it can benefit blind learners in Malaysia, not just through showing them the spelling of words, but also by helping them with sentence structure, grammar and context usage,” he told FMT Lifestyle.
According to Norazmi, who has over a decade of experience in special education, the reason no Braille bilingual dictionary exists is likely due to costs. He explained that adapting a regular book into Braille usually required about three times its page count, due to the extra space needed to fit the Braille dots.
A Braille version of a 500-page dictionary, therefore, would probably require around 1,500 pages. This requires a lot of resources, and the dictionary would only be purchased by a small number of people.
Despite this, Norazmi said he and his team felt “called” to produce the dictionary, for the benefit of blind learners in Malaysia.
“We hope that it will positively impact special learning in the country, and encourage more blind learners to take up higher education. This will help upgrade their skills so they can compete better in the local job market,” he said.
Currently, he said the dictionary would contain entries for about 1,300 words, in around 1,500 pages over 20 volumes. They aimed to create five copies over the next six months to a year.
He explained that the project was particularly aimed at primary and secondary students, as well as those studying at institutes of higher learning.
Cooperating to bring this initiative to fruition is Muslim Care Malaysia, Malaysian Foundation for the Blind, and City University Malaysia. The project is also supported by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Malaysian Institute of Translation and Books, and National Library of Malaysia.
Various experts on special education were also consulted to ensure the quality of the dictionary’s contents, Norazmi added, with the Oxford Fajar Bilingual Dictionary used as the main reference. About 17 volunteers were also recruited to input the words into the dictionary.
“It can be challenging sometimes. Arranging suitable times for our experts to get together to work on the dictionary requires a lot of coordination,” he said.
“Most of our inputs also are now being added through traditional methods on regular Braille machines. It would help if we knew more people who are familiar with new generation technology like Smart Braillers. That would speed up the progress.”
Despite this, he said the project was going well with his team currently having completed about 25-30% of the dictionary. They hope to get a prototype out within the next one or two months.
He shared that the English entries were more difficult to write than the Malay ones, due to the slightly more complicated system of Braille used in English. To account for this, they hired proofreaders, both sighted and blind to check the work.
His team had no plans to commercialise the dictionary, he said, as their sole mission is for the advancement of education and public good. They intend to distribute copies of it to local schools, universities, libraries and NGOs.
Norazmi said he and his team would gauge the response to their project’s early results, before starting work on Version 2.0 of their dictionary. This enhanced version will contain more word entries and more detailed definitions.
“Nowadays, the blind and the visually impaired have access to a wide variety of technology, which they have adapted to very well. We hope that our project will add to this, and be another useful tool to aid them in communication and education,” he concluded.
Follow Yayasan Orang Buta Malaysia on Facebook.