I-Stem

With a vision to use technology and community to enhance educational and employment opportunities for people with disabilities in India, and stemming from my own personal experience as a person with disability, I started I-Stem four years ago, conducting accessible skilling and training programs for people with disabilities and organizing events to sensitize universities and employers while also developing technology to convert textbooks into accessible formats (there is currently a “book famine” in our community where majority of the content published and shared is inaccessible and incompatible with assistive technologies), thereby empowering the community to realize their academic and professional pursuits. So far, we have worked with over 2,000 people with disabilities across India and have converted over 10,000 inaccessible pages into accessible formats. However, we are now looking to scale this work to reach even more people with disabilities in India and beyond with our vision to impact 50,000 individuals globally and convert over 1M pages that are otherwise inaccessible today into accessible and usable formats by 2022. Elevate prize, through the financial support, mentorship and network will provide us the resources to scale, and help us get the visibility and strategic partnerships and opportunities to realize our vision.

It was the year 2011 when I, like all other blind teenagers in India, dreamt of studying engineering at the top tech schools in the country. To do so, I had to study sciences in high school. But, when I reached out to the Central Board of education in the country to seek permission to pursue sciences, my application was denied citing inability of blind students like myself to pursue challenging and visual courses in the science track. My mentors and friends advised me to consider other opportunities and tracks, but I decided to challenge the authorities. After nine months of fervent appeals and petitions, I convinced the board to allow all blind students in India to pursue sciences. But this was far from the end of my challenge. The engineering schools denied me the support I needed to take their entrance exam. I finally applied to schools in the US and graduated with a CS degree from Stanford. But I knew where exactly to put my CS education to use, and I founded I-Stem, an organization that uses the latest in AI and a strong community to help people with disabilities pursue education and employment on an equal basis.

While there has been growing legal mandate for Inclusive Education through various legislations, access to equal and quality education remains a challenge for students with disabilities. For instance, the law mandates a 5% reservation for the disabled in India, but educational institutions are often at a loss in delivering inclusive education services to students enrolled, forcing students to rely on volunteers and often dropping out. Much of the content (e.g. textbooks, handouts etc.) remains inaccessible due to it being incompatible with assistive technologies used by people with disabilities, and over 98.1% of the top 1 M webpages are inaccessible to the blind according to a recent study by a web consultancy company WebAIM. Covid-19 has further exacerbated this challenge with a severe lack of volunteers. I-Stem is addressing this challenge through our AI-powered models that help convert inaccessible content (including documents with complex layouts and math) into accessible and usable formats, empowering people with disabilities to access content independently on an equal basis. Additionally, to bridge the gap between people with disabilities and employers resulting in 84% unemployment rate in India, I-Stem also organizes advocacy initiatives and tech-powered mentorship, training and recruitment initiatives, thereby seeking to level the playing field.

Current approaches of accessing inaccessible content are ineffective. Most people with disabilities in India and the developing world have to rely on volunteers to read out content to them which is unsustainable. Further, some recent technical innovations help extract text from images (which are otherwise unreadable by people with print disabilities), but only handle plain text and omit any structure and formatting which works for basic documents (e.g. business cards) but requires human remediation for academic documents and textbooks. By providing a powerful AI-powered tool that can convert inaccessible content into "accessible" and "usable" formats including the ability to handle a wide array of document types and structures, our solution empowers people with print disabilities to convert their content into accessible content with a high degree of precision independently. We also provide professional remediation support to correct any inaccuracies in the AI-generated result, guaranteeing a 100% accuracy to the user. This support to complete their education independently, in addition to our online community, mentorship, skilling and hiring initiatives makes our offering comprehensive and novel, differentiating us from other solutions in the disability space. The use of technology and partnerships with nonprofits also helps us scale quickly.

Access to education and information is a fundamental right, yet over 1.3 billion people with disabilities struggle to get it on an equal basis. One would think that the proliferation of digital technology would help, but it has only widened the gap due to inaccessible digital content and websites. Covid-19 has particularly highlighted the problem with crucial information from governments being inaccessible (threatening right to life) and a severe lack of volunteers making it even more challenging to access academic and professional content and resources. By providing a highly accurate automated workflow to convert inaccessible content into accessible and usable formats, we are empowering our community to not only access information (academic, professional and general information) otherwise unavailable to them, but also participate equally in the digital world. Additionally, by providing mentorship, skilling and corporate connect opportunities, we support our community to find and pursue meaningful opportunities and get the necessary support. In doing all of this, we are driven by our vision of a more equitable world where every person irrespective of their ability can lead a dignified, independent and fulfilling life.