It all started when I was in the 7th or the 8th grade when my vision was to be a Computer Scientist. I had a group of 5 or 6 friends in middle school who were national winners in Olympiads and competitive exams, and we would chat and read books about what would interest us. By the 9^th grade, all of us were pretty sure that we wanted to be programmers. We started coding even when programming was not offered as a subject in school. It was fascinating because you can pretty much do whatever you want with Computer Science and make a difference. In the 9th. grade we rewrote our school’s inventory system and the sense of achievement and satisfaction that we got out of it was pretty amazing. Of course, at that time we were also excited about ethical hacking. We had a school alumnus who was amazing at that and we would read his books and go, “Oh my God, this is so interesting!”

I started participating in Olympiads and getting awards and that was very motivating too. I knew that I could be a Computer Scientist if I wanted and by 11th grade I was pretty sure that this is what I wanted to be. At the same time, after seeing the insensitivity that I and other friends with disabilities had to face in India, I felt that I really wanted to develop software that would empower people. So it is basically social advocacy/disability advocacy but not doing it through the regular conventional way of organising movements but using technology about which I was and am passionate.

We would chat about anything we could think of from movies to books. We saw all the Harry Potter movies. I went on school trips, once to Mussoorie and once to Nainital for 2 or 3 days.

I think I have a very supportive family who were encouraging of whatever I did. Even in junior classes there were always hurdles. We just didn’t know how to approach a particular task which other students were doing: something as simple as drawing or colouring something or how I could participate actively in special events. It was all about coming up with alternative methods of doing something and my family was always helpful there. They and the teachers who teach blind students and my teachers at the DPS would go the extra step to ensure that I was also actively participating in the class as in they worked out accommodations for me. I think it was a collaborative effort that really helped me with different strategies to face the hurdles to learning.

That didn’t happen until 11th grade when I took the Science stream. It was really challenging. First of all, none of the books were available in accessible formats. I had to type out about 200-300 pages almost every day which was really time-consuming and required about 3 hours of effort and cutting into my study time.  There were so many diagrams which I could not see.
Here in the States, they have embossers and other technologies that help you to visualize. But, they are expensive for a middle class family like mine to acquire in India. How do you convey an organic chemistry model on the computer without drawing it? Drawing requires the use of a mouse and I cannot use a mouse. We had to come up with our own convention that would enable me to represent a molecule on the computer in a way that even sighted people would be able to understand what I had drawn on the computer. It was basically a subset of the IPAC convention which is a standard organic chemistry convention used around the world.
Nothing would have been possible without my teachers because they were the ones who would help me come up with stuff. We don’t have accessible lab equipment in India. So we used standard lab apparatus and someone would say the readings for me and I would work with that. When we had to work with chemicals, the teacher would not let me participate because he had security concerns. If you look at students in the States, they do everything on their own. They work with the most hazardous of chemicals. In that sense, in India, we have a long way to go.

I was shattered, especially because I had been taking coaching in a really good coaching program for the JEE and I had put in a lot of effort. It was a dream which I really wanted to get. I had to type out all of the coaching books. In the coaching centres, every topic has a separate book. If you have 50 topics in Chemistry that is 50 books which you have to type in accessible format. So I was basically typing 150 books each having about 60 pages. They had All India tests every week and I was performing really well and so I was hopeful that I would be able to make it to the IITs if they gave me the accommodations that I was getting at the coaching institute which was someone familiar with Science reading out the test properly to me.

Yes, one person got into IIT Jodhpur.

It is really unfortunate that most people don’t have adequate support in India. I am actually working on making things better. I am working on a startup with some friends in India and from Stanford that would help get Science and Math textbooks converted into accessible format so that a person in India would not have to put in manual effort to prepare them like I did. Some of us in this group are visually impaired and some aren’t. We think of it as a social project. We want to employ people with other disabilities that can do this job.

It is amazing that everyone in the Disabilities department at Stanford University is more than happy to volunteer their training resources and provide training to the new people in my startup. Stanford has contacts with assistive technology resources in Denmark with whom they put me touch.
Right now I am looking at the technical part of it. We are also reaching out to organisations like NSS and NCC in India to see if there are volunteers who will be able to help us with this. We also have to think about money since all of us involved in this are students. Let’s see where this goes.
All the sighted people are from my Stanford friends, while the blind people are in India and either passionate about Science or working towards their BCA degrees or have some technical background.

I think the first thing is that the students need to be really well-informed. This is true for NGOs as well that they have to be up-to-date on what is happening so they can correctly communicate to the students who ask them for help or they should ask the students to check the relevant website. There are special blind schools in India which still maintain that it is not possible for blind students to pursue Science or that it would be a bad decision to do so, because they don’t have teachers for Math and Science as none are available. This needs to stop. Whenever anyone asks me how Science is I never tell them optimistically that it is great or easy or fun. I have to be honest that it is hard. You find a lot of inaccessibility but if you want to do it you can.

Secondly, leverage technology as much as possible. There is a lot of information available. We have started a Google Group for Science and Engineering students in India. Now that there are other students who are studying Computer Science we have people who can answer questions as we’ve been through all the issues ourselves. When I was in India I used to be on the mailing list of the National Federation for the Blind in US. I would ask scientists questions on how to get some things done. This is a mailing list that others could use.

Thirdly, you have to be really strong. There are going to be all kinds of people who will tell you that you are stupid or that you can’t do something. Don’t listen to them. If something is getting too hard for you then you have to make an intelligent decision whether to continue. Just because you think that you can do it doesn’t mean that you will do it. Think about it for a while before giving up on something.

It is important to be in touch with the NGOs because the student shouldn’t reinvent the wheel as textbooks do not change. My version of these textbooks which I typed for myself is now available with the blind schools for students to avail. There is a fun and comprehensive website called Blindscience.org which is hosted by the National Center for Blind Youth in Science. It has a lot of information about techniques which should be really helpful.

One thing which is required is for people to embrace change. There needs to be more sensitivity on the part of people from institutes like IIT. I think in general too there needs to be more sensitivity. People in India still think that blind people can only be musicians and weavers. I’ve actually had people telling me this which were very surprising, that too by the Director of an institute. Knowledge is not prevalent even now, in spite of the availability of the Internet. If a family did not have a blind child would they really find out how a blind student works at a computer? Probably not, just as I don’t know much about people with other types of disabilities. There are ways of getting the point across through the media or TV shows or movies like Taare Zameen Par without it being a lecture. Information has to be spread in innovative ways. As part of my research project at Stanford last year I took a course on Bollywood and studied how people with disabilities are portrayed in Hindi movies. I was tracing it from 1939 to now. One thing that I found was that in terms of impact now is the time when you actually see the maximum amount of impact or response from the audience. I think this is the perfect time for even them to think about how they can inform people about these topics.

The first thing is how every American university is supposed to have a separate disability office. That’s not there in India at all. For example, Delhi University has a disabilities office for all colleges within its jurisdiction. You don’t want to set up a certain office just to fulfill a legal provision. You should want to help people and see how many people that each such office can really serve and should set up offices accordingly. I am sure that there are some success stories like the IIMs which do a commendable job, particularly IIM Bangalore. TISS in Mumbai does a fairly good job. Other Indian universities should emulate these institutions. I think a lot has to do with the attitude. We really need to move away from the sympathetic/charity based attitudes. It has to be a rights-based attitude. There has been a lot of discussion that in India it is a rights-based attitude but I don’t think that there is any truth in it. There are technical resources in the US like embossers. I don’t know how we can get that in India. I know that many of the US schools have groups of disability offices which get together and share their resources. That is a really good model that can be adopted in India if they really want to. SRCC in New Delhi bought a lot of the equipment from the US. It would be really cool if rather than one particular college using that equipment exclusively if other colleges also had access to it. It would be awesome if we really try to transition to electronic resources. I don’t know how practical that is especially because many of the professors do not have experience with computers in India. It would be cool if professors could prepare PowerPoint presentations which the student could review. There should be more collaboration between the schools.

It would be awesome if students across colleges could discuss what is working for us in our school. That is what we have been trying to do at Stanford. We have a disabilities group called Power2Act which allows discussions of what works and what needs improvement. I am the President of this group as social advocacy is my other passion.

My project last year, when I was interning with IBM, was about teaching Orientation and Mobility (O&M) Skills to Indian people. The reason for this is in that a city like Delhi there are only one or two mobility instructors and there are tens of thousands of blind people to train.  Most of them do not get the opportunity to get a formal training in mobility. We worked on an Android application that simulated O&M training. The user would know where he is right now and the app would use an algorithm to calculate the most optimum route that the person could take to a certain place. On the way we could detect obstacles as well and tell the user how to avoid them. I had to undergo mandatory orientation and mobility training at Stanford. The instructor was from a blind institute in Palo Alto but my training was arranged by the disabilities office.