Category Archives: Autism

iPad Books Will Reshape Multimedia

Finally, my iPad book, Living With Autism, a multi-touch book has been published on iTunes. The iPad, for me, is a good platform to tell multimedia stories. But I faced many challenges publishing from Nepal.

For seven years as a journalist, I worked on a television station in Nepal; I also wrote for print, online, blogs, and on social media. No platform has been as effective in telling a simple story than the iPad. It’s quite interesting with the flexibility it provides – one can include photo galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, and more. The iBooks Author app, which allows users to create books on the iPad, is an easy-to-use software that has helped me design, layout and publish the book. Living with Autism, free to download for iPad, is divided into five sections and is supplemented by infographics, photos, video, text and social media elements.

Autism is a life-long neuro-developmental disorder. The United Nations has said that autism is growing as a global health crisis. But many people in Nepal don’t know about autism because we lack awareness programs.
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Silent sufferers

Autism TKP

My story ‘Silent sufferers’ published in The Kathmandu Post on Saturday, March 31, 2012. Here is a link to the pdf version: http://epaper.ekantipur.com/ktpost/showtext.aspx?boxid=14312234&parentid=16742&issuedate=3132012 and for web version: http://www.ekantipur.com/2012/03/31/saturday-features/silent-sufferers/351523.html

Four-year-old Binu Dangol enters the room with her mother and father, dressed daintily in a blue t-shirt and trousers, her hair done neatly, but I can see that she’s scared. She leans away at the sight of me and my camera, ready to take flight, and I have very little idea of how to comfort her.

It was an International Reportage Workshop with photojournalist Philip Blenkinsop, jointly organised by photo.circle, Pathshala South Asian Media Academy and Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, that had triggered a desire within me to shed light upon stories that are yet untold. Among many such issues that exist within our country, it was the silent sufferers of autism—a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder—that particularly caught my attention. And Binu is one of them.
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