Suresh Bazaj

Hear2Read

Suresh Bazaj founded Hear2Read in the Fall of 2013, with the goal of providing equal education and employment opportunities to children and adults with Visual Impairment (VI). He has been working with the VI community in India, harnessing technology to help them lead a life of dignity and independence. There are over 60 million visually impaired people in India.

Suresh got inspired when he met many visually-impaired people in US with good jobs working side by side with other professionals with normal eye sight. He realized that the key difference between US and India is that the VI population in US has access to good education using “Text to Speech” (TTS) software for English.

Harnessing his 40 plus years of software experience, Suresh helped develop TTS software for Indic languages, to help millions of visually impaired children get good education leading to jobs with good pay. Currently, there are about 2,000 active users across 7 languages (Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu).

Hear2Read Apps are also being used by “print disabled” people who cannot read printed text for a variety of medical conditions including dyslexia or simply because they never learned to read text in a particular language.