From 329.000 blind people in Colombia, 92% belong to low income and middle classes. Most of them have access to computers but can´t use Internet, because the existing aids are extremely expensive, limited and hard to find.

Just clicking on ELTIEMPO.COM, the Web Site from the most important newspaper in the Country, any sighted people will be able to read a news article out loud and record it immediately so its also available for the blind people on the site www.bancodevoz.org

In www.bancodevoz.org, blind people can listen news read by hundreds of Colombians, replacing the robotic voices some devices use, with a human voice.

Just pressing one key on their keyboard, blind people can surf the Web, as any other people would on a call center service, using their hearing sense and the number keys on their keyboard.

On March 14, 2013 different public personalities, among singers, actors and politicians, donated their voices and read the news from El Tiempo, Colombia’s most read newspaper, to the blind.

That’s how in alliance with the RCBA (CRAC), the Rehabilitation Center for Blind Adults, we created the Voice Bank: A permanent platform that delivers an auditory version of the news to the visually impaired.

At that moment the Voice Bank started to have a life of its own, thanks to hundreds of Colombians that donated their voices, reading news from eltiempo.com for the visual impaired.

The amount of DONORS from the VOICE BANK grow on a daily basis, generating a self-sufficient digital platform powered by users, such as Wikipedia or TripAdvisor.

Today, more Web Pages have activated the program and new contents are available for users, which could mean this platform is becoming the Internet for the blind people.