Boltay Huroof – Working for the Visual Impaired Community

Author: 
Haajira Ghauri
Monday, December 20, 2021

The education sector of Pakistan has gone under major transformation over past few years but not a lot of attention is paid to education of PWD (Person with Disabilities). Majority of visually impaired individuals are unable to continue their education due to lack of proper material available for them and most of them stayed unemployed and are dependent on others for survival even in this era.
Umer Farooq, a young aspiring entrepreneur identified this issue and addressed it by embarking on a mission to empower the visually impaired community by providing better access to braille books. He aims to create new opportunities and provide higher education for the visually impaired community to improve their literacy rate and increase the likelihood of their employment by providing access to braille books on multiple subjects.
Boltay Huroof is an alumni startup of Plan9 and was a part of the 15th cohort. It is a social enterprise that is bridging the gap between PWD and rest of the society. They have developed Pakistan’s first desktop application that can properly translate Urdu language in braille. With the scope to expand globally, they are also working on other Pakistani native languages.
The user friendly interface of their application converts the language to braille in seconds. This speedup, whole process for visually impaired individuals, with the help of their inclusive features of audio feedback, incorrect word indication, suggestion for correct words and a dictionary with 130K words for misspelling and word suggestion algorithm.
Their pure thoughts for working on betterment of society have helped them grow at a steady pace and they are reaching new heights. In Nov, 2021 Mr. Umer, was invited to Soft Launch ceremony in Sindh Governor House, where President of Pakistan, ‘Dr. Arif Alvi’ launched ‘Boltay Huroof’ application in Karachi city. They have multiple ongoing deals with different banks, social welfares and were also announced winner at P@SHA, ICT Awards 2021 in their category. Under Umer’s leadership Boltay Huroof is working on expanding its team and plan to open raise investment in the near future.