"Deaf-blind individuals are a unique, heterogeneous group of individuals whose disability is greater than the sum of the individuals’ disabilities of deafness or blindness (Kelly, 2002)....  In India, a lot of work has been done for single disability people but when it comes to multiple disabled people the services are almost negligible." (Dr Sushama Sharma, Reader, KUK | Services for deafblind individuals in India |(2011)

VIBRATIONS is a series of mobile apps, that will enable the deafblind to receive and produce information to communicate using a smart phone. The project plans to use vibrations to read text to make wikipedia readable (by filtering out the unnecessary text, images and details), explore benefit of speech-to-text to listen to others and text-to-speech facility to type in text and make it possible for them to post tweets.

Project VIBRATIONS was launched in November 2010 with the aim to develop mobile apps that would benefit persons who are both deaf and blind, enabling them to communicate bidirectionally and access information, without the caregiver. Under the project, apps will be developed to enable them to (1) read and send SMSes (1) access information from Wikipedia (3) Use speech-to-text and text-to-speech to communicate (4) Post tweets.

The objectives of the Project is:

• To create a tiny window into a dark and silent world of the deafblind to find ways for them to communicate and to access and produce a variety of useful information via smart phone.
• To help persons who are deafblind to communicate using Android phones.
  
• To train engineering students to write software for the disabled, while becoming sensitized to their needs.
• To raise awareness among the caregiver community and government, so that real change can be brought about in the lives of people who have seen negligible benefit from the information revolution.
• To keep costs as low as possible, so that the apps can continue to be made available to the deaf-blind community free of cost.

PocketSMS app, which has recently been completed, is the first app of the VIBRATIONS family, which has been completed and launched. It uses vibrations as in Morse Code to read text and gesture based handwriting recognition to type-in text, to read incoming SMS and send SMS (text).

Person who are both deaf and blind need to learn morse code to use the apps being developed under the Project VIBRATIONS. We have developed a simple app to help them learn morse code on their Android phone.