Over the years we have tried to do our bit for those afflicted with cerebral palsy and therefore, when we heard about an assistive device that can give an artificial voice to a child with cerebral palsy, we wanted to explore its possibilities to help the organisations in our network who helped afflicted people. Avaz was a portable speech synthesizer that could be controlled by the gross motor movements of a child with limited mobility and it had the ability to capture, read and decode approximate movements of the head or of large muscle groups. By choosing icons, symbols and words from a touch screen, the child could create sentences which would then be read out aloud by the device.

We referred the product, "Avaz", to educators who recommended it as an assistive device that could give children with cerebral palsy a ´voice´.

Convinced of the merits of Avaz, Apeejay Trust funded the production of several such devices that were then donated to two organisations - the Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy and Bikash, an NGO in the Bankura district of West Bengal. We believe we have provided a path-breaking tool for improving the communication of persons with disability connected with these two organisations and thus gone a step further from funding their projects under our Social Sector Initiatives Program established in 2005.