Dr. Arun Mehta
President, Bidirectional Access
Promotion Society, bapsi.org

• Often not even separately counted during a census, but in
India alone, almost half a million deaf-blind children estimated
• Neither does technology for the blind work for them, nor does that for the deaf
• The only way for a deaf-blind person to use a computer or the Internet was to use a refreshable Braille device costing thousands of Dollars
• Relatively little material is available in Braille, particularly in poor countries and rural areas
• Both in blindness and deafness, there are varieties and grades: multiply the two, and you get very large variety in deaf-blindness. Hard to find optimal technological solutions

• PocketSMS is a free app for smart phones that allows a deaf-blind person to receive and send text messages
• Incoming messages are communicated to the user via vibration in Morse code (170 year old technology).
• The user can type a reply using a QWERTY keyboard if one available, or use gesture-recognition
(e.g. Graffiti)
• We developed a Morse trainer as well
• Mail, Wikipedia, Twitter, as well as access to text-to-speech and speech-to-text in the pipeline
• Coded by a student (Anmol Anand) under summer training
• http://www.bapsi.org/Home/pocketsms-for-android for more

• the variety of disabilities, their combinations and varying severities indicate that we need different software, content too, for each child
• also, the software must grow with the child, and be able to handle multiple languages
• It must be able to do all the different things people do with computers
• Our free cloud-based Skid platform
(skid.org.in) tries to scratch the surface here
• Exploring singing and other artisitic skills, to open new channels of communication

• Employees of tech companies are several times more likely to be autistic as compared to general population
• Because there is a likely genetic component in autism, the problem is even more severe in the next generation
• ASD Levels in Eindhoven (tech hub):229/10000; Haarlem
84, Utrecht 57 per 10000 among children aged 4 to 16
• Persons with cognitive disabilities typically find it much easier to communicate through computers than face-to-face
• In other words, the tech industry should be dealing with this problem at 3 levels: their own employees, their children, and also the technology they make, which is often the primary means of communication for those with such disabilities
• Most companies pay little to no attention to these problems

• With existing technology, Internet access is impossible for those who aren't rich but have severe disabilities, for whom tech development must be a priority, free and open source!
• Technology customization for each individual essential, but this may be impractical given hourly rates in the developed world. The manpower and cost-structure of developing countries makes this approach possible, giving us the potential to unlock some brilliant minds
• Education needs to move away from trying to teach the student everything, to teaching her only essential skills, including one that affords her employment and self-respect
• Better filters needed to reduce web pages to only the essential information