PlanetRead - What You Hear Is What You Read

PlanetRead.org is an e-learning project supported by Google.org where the letter "e" stands for entertainment through movie songs of Indian films.

As you will noticed in this example, PlanetRead aims to spread literacy and give reading practice through films songs and folk music which are so close to the heart of most Indians.

The PlanetRead concept, envisaged by Dr Brij Kothari, is simple but very effective - when a song plays on the TV screen, the subtitles in the same language follow the lyrics of the song as scrolling text. As a particular word is being spoken by the character in the song, the color of the subtitle-text changes helping the audience identify the word.

This helps people learn or practice reading while they hum bypassing the traditional textbook method. They have paid attention to every details - look at the font sizes, they are large enough so that even the back-benchers can read what's on the TV screen.

Kamla Bhatt has done podcast interview with the founder of PlanetRead. And here's another interview with Dr Larry of Google.org who also played as an extra in an old Dev Anand movie.