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information sharing without the ability to read and write. Such intervention
is bound to lend a hand to the fight against illiteracy by producing e-literates
out of illiterates. We may therefore be able to redefine literacy, changing
its definition from ‘the ability to read and write’ to ‘the capacity to engage
literature’.
The use of multimedia in the fight against illiteracy should be approached at
two main levels. The first level involves the basic application of multimedia
for documentation. This entails the use of audio recordings to document
spoken information as well as the use of static images and motion picture to
provide visual complements to such audio recordings. At a more advanced
level we can use speech technologies such as Automatic Speech recognition
(ASR) and Text-to-speech (TTS) Synthesis to turn speech into written text
and written text in to speech respectively. This way we can derive all the
advantages of written texts even without the ability to read and write.
The use of hand-held devices such as Mobile Phones and Tablets is widening
access to multimedia-enabled devices. Unfortunately however, the applications
built for these devices still reflect a clear bias for written texts. As the popularity
of these hand-held devices continues to grow, there is a need to reassess this bias
for written texts in order to empower that large population of people who still
live in oral societies to benefit from the cyberspace. To grow a truly multi-lingual
cyberspace, we need to carefully reevaluate the importance of writing within
the context of new developments in digital technologies and thereby make
deliberate efforts to elevate the status of multimedia. We should not continue
to overrate the importance of writing while there are other information media
and modes that offer advantage we cannot afford to overlook.
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