Meet blind entrepreneur Vidhya Y; making STEM accessible for visually impaired students through Vision Empower

 

It is suggested to students with visual impairment that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) courses are not for them, it is mainly because there isn’t a well-designed curriculum set for such students  to learn the subjects efficiently.

Karnataka's entrepreneur Vidhya Y, who is visually challenged since birth, also faced several difficulties in studying science and mathematics, owing to their visual nature and discouraged by several institutions and teachers for pursuing science.

Vidya's  personal experience as a person with visual impairment motivated her to start Vision Empower (VE), which offers an accessible learning management platform to promote experiential learning of STEM subjects, computational thinking, and digital literacy, and also includes early childhood programmes. Now,  she empowers thousands of people with visual impairments through Vision Empower, a non-profit organization.

During the panel discussion conducted by World Summit on Information and Society (WSIS) Forum 2022 on the International Day for Women and Girls in Science, Vidhya Y, the co-founder of Vision Empower said; "The current generation has over 1.1 million children with visual impairment in India yet in all the generations till now, less than 50 of them have chosen to study STEM subjects beyond high school.”

“To promote STEM learning, we started by giving out textbooks to visually impaired children with diagrams they could understand by touching and feeling. The theory is in braille and the diagrams are in 2D,” says Vidhya. Earlier they started with providing these materials to students from class 4 to class 6, but have now expanded to include kids from class 1 to class 10.

Vision Empower is currently working with over 30 schools across six states on a portfolio that covers STEM, computational thinking, and digital literacy, especially for teachers with blindness. This year, VE has been able to touch more than 18,000 direct and indirect beneficiaries, with the help of more than 300 volunteers. The plan for the coming year is to reach 100 schools across the country.

VE is a result of collaborative efforts  of the teachers and children with visual impairment, from the design stage till the implementation. But, the role of government partnerships, content creation assistance, research collaborations and volunteer support cannot be undermined as these have also played a vital role for Vision Empower in designing an accessible and inclusive ecosystem that is scaling up to 5 states in the country.

(Left to right) Vidhya Y and Supriya Dey founded Vision Empower for school students while Kartik Sawhney, founder of iSTEM, decided to focus on college students

Vidya  bagged gold medals in her Master’s programme in Digital Society Programming at IIIT-Bangalore. Despite all her success no company was willing to hire her. That’s when she decided to use this setback as an opportunity and decided to create jobs for others instead, as an entrepreneur, with a mission to make STEM education accessible to visually-impaired students. In 2017, Vidhya launched Vision Empower with Amit Prakash, her professor at IIIT, and Supriya Dey, a research student at the institute. Today they help other visually-challenged people to taste success, through effective learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses.

As a Research Fellow at Microsoft, Vidhya co-authored two papers published by ACM. She has also hosted 35 episodes as an RJ on science and technology, which benefited thousands of visually-impaired listeners. 28-year-old visually-impaired successful entrepreneur beats all odds to not only conquer STEM learning, but also to help others like her.

VE also creates STEM learning programme-Anubhav, whose aim is to develop a scientific temperament. The focus at Anubhav workshops is to find fun ways to learn, says O Aishwarya, an Educational Co-ordinator. “Science concepts taught through experiential learning included magnets, density, friction, etc. The children drive cars through paths made of different textures to experience friction, test out what floats and what sinks to be introduced to the concept of density, and act out skits to learn about the water cycle”.