The Story So Far
It all started in a 10X5 room with our founder, Shanti and her initial team of employees with vision impairment. The intent was clear. To make the visually impaired ‘battle ready’ for skilled jobs in the open labour market. How would this happen? By acquiring digital mastery on computers.
Today we are elated to see thousands of visually impaired people employed in varied computer-based jobs. They are working in the area of medical transcription, spam management, service management, program management, human resources and so on. Every issue that can pose a hurdle on the job, has been anticipated and converted into hundreds of ‘experiential exercises’ and ‘role simulations’. Jobs traditionally perceived to be ‘visual’ are no longer out of reach for the blind.
This tool is the secret sauce for gaining parity via digital mastery, and it’s available to each one of the 285 million visually impaired people living across the world. With contributions from all of you (our users) working in different arenas, we hope to build a tool that is shaped by the community’s knowledge and experience.
One of our trainers recalls teaching fonts to Parimala, who is blind by birth. She typed the first letter in size 20, second one in italics, and the third letter in a different font altogether. That’s when we realized that sighted perspective was key for achieving equity. Today such nuances and more, have been built into the computer exercises.
