On Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Amar Jain, a visually impaired lawyer with one of India’s top law firms, writes on how technology and software has empowered him to become an equal performer and competitor in a challenging profession.
I am an advocate and accessibility professional based out of Mumbai. As a corporate lawyer, with over six years’ experience in capital markets and banking and finance respectively, I deal with primary and secondary offerings for raising money through capital markets, for instance through Initial Public Offers and qualified institutional placements.
I am completely blind and use a screen reader software called Jaws, which reads out what gets displayed on screen. In conjunction with a screen reading software, I also use optical character recognition or (OCR) to convert printed material into a machine readable material, which I can then read using my software.
Formative years
I was brought up in Jodhpur, Rajasthan and studied in a Hindi medium blind school. Being in a typical traditional setup, I have had the benefit of experiencing world both without and with technology.
For initial years, we studied with traditional Braille books, and audio cassettes. Nobody then knew that technology had the great potential to change the way I would be able to live my life. Add to it were the linguistic and regional barriers. Even from a perspective of choosing a career, I had the conventional choices of being a teacher, singer or banker, which I chose not to do.
Zeal for technology
But ever since I got introduced to technology, and with the zeal to self-learn through internet and other online resources, my horizons expanded, and out of all available options, I chose law as a career. One of the primary reasons why I was driven towards law was to ensure that persons with disabilities are able to avail their basic rights, which could be something as simple as opening a bank account which were continued to be denied to persons with disabilities.
Most often, it was common for others to judge and question my abilities because of the functional limitation of not being able to see. It started from education, went on to jobs, and then touched every aspect of my life. But the advent of technology completely changed the way I started to grow.
I completed my law from the Government Law College, Mumbai. And the major challenge for me during that phase was to be able to access the material in a readable format as the printed material was inaccessible for me. However, with the help of the screen reading software and OCR technology, my father and I not only scanned various books, converted into a readable formats, but I soon became an equal performer and competitor.
Getting independent
Using the same software, I started to give my exams independently on computer, which allowed me to write my own answer scripts. All of this would have otherwise required enormous human support and still I would have suffered due to human errors either in converting the books, or in writing my answers.
Slowly, technology gave me independence in many areas such as financial decision making, from investments to trading to banking, entertainment, travelling, and many more.
When I started to work with my first law firm, many had questions, on how would I be a transactional lawyer, how would I commute on a daily basis, and so on.
Belief in software
But one thing which never questioned my limitations and continued to empower me was technology. Soon, technology like Google Maps started helping me in daily commute, along with other transportation aggregator services. Similarly, many new software developed, which allowed me to quickly read documents on the go, process bulk documents through OCR, and the list has been ever growing since then.
With the artificial intelligence (AI) being expanded, I am now able to convert hand written text into machine readable text, identify colour of my clothes, do independent indoor mobility in unknown locations, and much more.
One of the challenges though, is the inaccessible design. To illustrate, as I am unable to see, therefore, every photograph that we put out, needs to have a meaningful textual description so that people like us are able to grasp the content or the creativity of such photograph. Similarly, every button, icon or a link needs to have a correct programmatically discernible name, so that my software reads not just the fact that it is an icon or a button, but also describes its meaningful name such as “submit button”.
To achieve this, we design websites and applications using “accessibility”. World Wide Web Consortium, which designs web standards, provides a set of standards called “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines”, which if implemented, can make websites and applications accessible. Similarly, each operating system has its own design principles to make the applications accessible to everyone. And accessibility helps everyone, be it a person with disability, elderly, children or any other user.
In conclusion, I would only say that coupled with your attitude, technology which is accessible and inclusive for everyone, becomes a tool of empowerment for everyone.If we design technology keeping the diversed needs of people in mind, then technology has the great potential to empower everyone, including those with a disability.
(Global AccessibilityAwareness Dayis celebrated to mark the digital inclusion of over 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide on third Thursday of May annually.)
