Two final year information technology students from a private engineering college in Tambaram have constructed a keyboard which, they say, could help visually challenged persons operate computers with ease.

The project titled 'Hardware Keyboard for Visually Impaired' won the first place at a national-level technology meet at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and was also presented at Worldcomp 2007, a global conference on embedded systems and their applications in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, last month.

S. Sivaraman and R. Srikanth, students of Sri Sai Ram Engineering College, said that they had been doing projects in different areas since their first year but wanted to do something that would be benefit a disadvantaged section of the society. They wanted to make life easier for the visually challenged.

Their keyboard features 17 logical switches equipped with soft 'touch sensors'. Using them 62 characters can be typed.

Twelve of the switches were in the 'hash' pattern and the rest in the 'cross' pattern on the keyboard. There was also an integrated text-to-speech conversion system, to minimise the probability of errors.

According to the students, visually challenged people would need just a week to get used to the keyboard and type about 40 characters a minute.