ASSISTECH: An Accidental Journey into Assistive Technology

Abstract

My ASSISTECH journey started by accident. Myself and Mr. Dipendra Manocha (see the adjoining profile) had a common acquaintance with whom he used to meet and exchange audio cassettes in the late 90s and early 2000. Note Dipendra lost his eye sight when he was around 12 years of age. On his reference, Dipendra one day came to meet me with a request that can I help in making the "emacs" editor in Linux accessible through the screen reader software. At that time Dipendra was managing the computer center in NAB (National Association of Blind). At that time I myself was deeply into research and tool development only in the broad areas of VLSI/EDA tools with special focus on system level design that included high level synthesis as well as hardware-software co-design. For such application development, I neither had the skills nor any special interest. On the other hand, I was completely overwhelmed by the sincerity and focus of Dipendra and thus I decided to involve some students through a mini-project. They did manage to develop a basic solution but the solution itself did not get widely deployed but formed the beginning of a very long and fruitful relationship. In the initial years, most of our engagements were similar-he would propose a project (mainly software based) and I would identify a set of project students who would be jointly mentored by us to work on the solution. We became closer and I was always impressed with his ease of understanding the technological capabilities as well as limitations without any formal training in Science or Engineering. Being blind did not seem to matter at all! Note Dipendra's formal college education consists of an undergraduate and postgraduate degree in music. He had immense capability to explain the needs of the visually impaired in a