ICTs for those with multiple or
cognitive disabilities
Dr. Arun Mehta
President, Bidirectional Access
Promotion Society, bapsi.org
The special problems of the deaf-blind
• 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
Bapsi's innovations for the deaf-blind
• 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
Problems relating to cognitive
disabilities, and Bapsi's approach
• 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
Tech industry and cognitive disabilities
• 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
“Internet access as basic human right:"
Excellent initiative, but…
• 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