Tunisia –Ibsar Association prints the Holy Qur’an in Braille

Location: Tunis – Tunisia

Language: Arabic

Voice: Natural

Duration: 00:05:21

Source: A24:

Restriction: A24 Clients

Dateline: 05-02-2022

Storyline

Ibsar Association, a civil society association in Tunisia, carried out a project to print the Holy Qur’an in Braille in collaboration with the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

This is Tunisia’s first initiative that aims to enable the blind to read the Qur’an for free, while the ministry works to distribute printed copies to mosques across the country.

The visually impaired in the Arab world, numbering around 25 million people, suffer from a lack of capabilities and funds to print books they can read, in addition to basic difficulties in the Braille language, which is designed for Latin letters, and there are no copies of Arabic.

A considerable segment of the visually impaired has been able to overcome their difficulties in adapting to society as a result of technological development.

Shotlist

• (SOUNDBITE) Mohammed bin Al-Mansoori – Head of Ibsar Association for the Visually Impaired:

“We, in cooperation with the Ministry of Religious Affairs, carried out a project to print the Quran in Braille. The goal is to distribute a copy to every mosque, which number 6000 mosques, to allow every person with visual impairment who goes to the mosque to find a Quran in their way so that they can read”

• (SOUNDBITE) Mohammed bin Al-Mansoori – Head of Ibsar Association for the Visually Impaired:

“We also produced at latest 150 books of literary genre, magazines like Al-Hayat Al-Thaqafia magazine and well-known novels in Tunisia like “Al-Qantara, Al-Hayat and Al-Munabet” and “Hadath Abu Huraira” and “Al-Sad”. we also produced a kind of legal magazine that was issued by the official printing press.”

• (SOUNDBITE) Mohammed bin Al-Mansoori – Head of Ibsar Association for the Visually Impaired:

“Braille printers are raw, I mean they are a set of dots that people sense as bumps on the paper. These bumps consist of six levels that do not exceed the size of the fingers so that you can pass your fingertips and create a picture in your mind around the letter, then the word, then the sentence, paragraph, then text. These machines are very expensive, and the cost of the book in addition to the quality of the special paper is high. 5 pages cost one dinar, if we convert them into Braille, its price becomes 4 dinars. Unfortunately, Arabic took the Latin letters with Braille, and thus reading them is from left to right, and with the development of Braille, the musical symbols, the symbols of mathematics, and now developed symbols can also be produced in Braille.”

• (SOUNDBITE) Mohammed bin Al-Mansoori – Head of Ibsar Association for the Visually Impaired:

“Technology and techniques have developed in the world, facilitating the lives of people with visual disabilities, access to society, and their daily life like the rest of people. We only have two issues, the high cost, and we do not find in our Arab country anyone interested in training and developing these technologies coming from the West, which depends first on English, Spanish, and German, and then comes Arabic in the last. We have about 25 million visually impaired people in our Arab world, and we must take care of them and make programs for them, whether through civil society, to support their abilities not to leave them living on the margins of society. They are human beings and citizens and they must be treated like other citizens. They have the right to learn, play sports, and access cultures, such as theater, cinema, museums, and everything that other citizens receive.

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