Taken from New Indian Express.
KASARGOD: Nalin Sathyan has successfully hidden his other identity — Nalin.x.Linux — for long. He is as obscure as his home, a two-bedroom blind teacher’s quarters hidden by outgrown grass on Seethangoli Road at Vidyanagar in Kasargod.
Only five persons, including his family of four, know Nalin has been participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) for the past two years, winning $5,500 each season (`6.76 lakh) as stipend from the technology giant at Mountain View, California. However, the anonymity of Nalin.x.Linux is restricted
to the physical world.
In the world of free software, his one product -- IBus-Sharada-Braille -- is downloaded 100 times every week. “For me the recognition came when Google FedExed me the G-Soc T-shirt,” says Nalin, who is awaiting results of BSc Computer Science and has an internship offer from Google.
Asked why he did not prefer an engineering college, Nalin said, “I could not make the cut because my Maths marks were low in Plus 2.” The green and red
GSOC T-shirts from 2013 and 2014 hang on his wall. That also partially explains why he did not want to share his achievements with his college.
For him, his guru is his blind father, Sathyaseelan K, an English teacher at Government School for Blind, at Vidyanagar, here.
“My father is the brain behind IBus-Sharada-Braille,” said Nalin. He he named the software after his mother. All Indian languages have more than 50 letters. IBus- Sharada-Braille reduces the number of keys in a keyboard to six, a lift from Braille, to type in any of the languages. “Since Braille dots are based
on phonetic, once you master it, you can type in any language,” says Nalin.
Some of his friends are already using it to type in Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil, English and Spanish. The software also makes typing very fast. For example all the six keys pressed together will produces the word “for”. “Till now people with sight contributed to help the blind.
This is the first time Braille is being used to help those who can see,” says Sathyaseelan, who brought his Braille expertise to the table to help Nalin write the code. Nalin says with modifications, the software can be used in touch phones. Anivar Aravind, a technology consultant said till now a blind
person had to affix another input device, often expensive, to use computers.
“IBus-Sharada- Braille changes that. Now a blind person can use the keyboard to write or enter data.” The product has already been accepted into the Debian repository, which vouches for its standard.
Source: New Indian Express.
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