Scattered
on technology specialist Amit Bagwe's desk beside his laptop are a Sam sung
tablet and an iPhone7.
It's like
any other tech worker's desk, except for the portable electronic magnifier he
uses to read what's on his screen. Bagwe, who was born with low vision and lost
sight in his right eye in 2005 following an accident in the chemistry lab,
works with BarrierBreak in Mumbai, helping companies modify their software to
include the needs of people with disabilities as well as train the disabled to
use software. “Saying technology is a boon may seem like a cliché but just ask
a person with a disability,“ he says.
Forced to
drop out of college after the accident, the turning point came in 2012 when he
signed up for a threemonth internship at BarrierBreak.“That's when I started
using screen readers,“ he says. He returned to college for a BSc in information
technology . “I could study on my own, navigate the city , go to a restaurant
for a meal. I never thought I'd own a smartphone let alone use one,“ he says.
Assistive
technology designed to help people with disabilities with their daily tasks is
a huge and untapped market in India largely because developers and companies
are unaware of their needs. There's been progress in recent years -for
instance, buried in the settings of any smartphone are accessibility controls
for the disabled -but not all products, apps and devices are easy to use since
the needs of the disabled aren't considered at the design and conceptualisation
stage.
Dr Nirmita
Narasimhan, senior fellow and programme director, Global Initiative for
Inclusive ICT, is confident that technology will reduce inequality and
inability, and negate frustration. But there are hurdles. “We have screen
readers but the technology is not enabled to support a third-party device, or
someone hires a consultant to make a website accessible once, then more content
is uploaded later and that's not accessible,“ she says.
Gaurav
Mittal, co-founder of EyeD, an app that uses the smartphone's camera to guide
people, says the main challenge is empathy . “Observing the world as a person
who cannot see is hard. And they are slow to share deeply with us. What makes
them laugh, what makes them cry, we need to know this to truly design a product
that will help.“
With the
app and its text reading function, a visually impaired user can navigate
streets, find landmarks, and identify objects of interest. His team has also
developed a customisable Eye-D keypad that makes smartphones easier to use for
the blind. Mittal started Eye-D as “a hobby project“ in 2012 after spending a
day at National Association for the Blind in Bengaluru during a CSR event for
his former employer.“I was amazed that visually impaired people could code and
use computers easily but struggled to use a smartphone and do things such as
navigate the city independently,“ he says. In 2015, he quit his job and went
fulltime; the app is now used by people in 160 countries. EyeD launched a Hindi
reading OCR (optical character recognition) version last month, costing Rs 800.
Ajit
Narayanan points out that software developed for the disabled community can
serve a wider population. His Avaz app and its complementary FreeSpeech app
-developed to help children with cerebral palsy, autism and speech impairment
use pictures to communicate and learn grammar and language -is now also used by
students in China to learn English. “Conversely, the iPad, invented for people
without disabilities, had so many features that made it easy for the disabled
to use,“ says Narayanan, 36. He started his company , Invention Labs, in 2007
but struggled initially to create a device.“Once the iPad was released in 2010,
things took off as we could just focus on the software,“ he says. Apple's Siri
and Amazon's Alexa are based on speech recognition software devel oped for the
blind but are now used widely just to make life easier for everyone. Microsoft
recently released a free iPhone app that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to
tell the blind what is around them. If the phone is pointed at a park, the
camera app, named Seeing AI, can describe what the scene looks like. Similarly
, it can tell the amount of your restaurant bill.
The
problem is that most people with disabilities are introduced to technology only
at college level.“They lose so much time,“ says Siddhant Chothe, co-founder,
Tekvision, a Pune-based startup that helps companies comply with accessibility
standards. Chothe, who has had low vision since birth, says he's getting more
enquiries for training and compliance since the government passed the Rights of
Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, which makes it mandatory for government
and private service providers to make all services inclusive and
accessible.Legislation means more developers will learn to create inclusive
products and clients will demand them.“Inclusivity doesn't have to be an
expensive afterthought,“ he says.“It's really quite simple to design keeping
our needs in mind.“
In India,
however, only a few can afford this technology. “This is because we are still
retrofitting. All the solutions are coming from the West.We need more
indigenous development,“ says Shilpi Kapoor, founder and CEO, BarrierBreak, an
accessibility consulting and assistive technology firm. She's also started Newz
Hook, an inclusive news website.
Dr Shamnad
Basheer, founder of Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access, says the idea of
disability will change over time. “With the development of AI, augmented
reality, ideas like the bionic eye and other technology, the notion of
disability could disappear,“ says Basheer, whose organisation has helped 23
disabled students enter law college.
Source: THE TIMES OF INDIA-7th November
