Real-life story/Interview of people with disabilities

Humanity in action – loss of vision sparks innovations for a renowned Google scientist

“Every single time you help somebody stand up you are helping humanity rise”. ― Steve Maraboli. Raman is passionately helping humanity with his great innovations in the world of accessibility. His contributions in solving accessibility issues were kick started when he came up with innovative solutions for his early challenges due to the onset of blindness. His notable work includes Emacspeak which is a speech interface that allows visually impaired users to interact independently and efficiently with computers, Google accessible search, ChromeVox which is a free screen reader that brings the speed, simplicity and security of Chromebooks to visually-impaired users and many more. He was awarded the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD thesis "Audio System for Technical Readings."

Thank you Raman for your time. Your interview will motivate all our community. The interview with T.V Raman was conducted by Uplifting Voices in July 2017. More Info

You have worked to improve computer accessibility throughout your career, especially with Google over the last decade. With the proliferation of mobile devices this technology now impacts everyone. What is you prediction for advancements in accessibility technologies in the next ten to twenty years?TVR: First some terminology: I think of accessibility more broadly as using computing to enhance the human ability — rather than as computer accessibility. This distinction is important; the latter assumes that computers get built, then somehow made accessible to users with special needs.
Instead, it's more productive to think of computers as a tool that enhance human ability — Computers, like telescopes and electron microscopes, are just one more tool. Just as telescopes allow us to look into space, computers enable us to analyze massive amounts of information — and as we convert more and more of world into digital information, they give us the ability to interact with and manipulate our world in increasingly sophisticated ways.
Now with this above context, let's ask ourselves what computing might do for users with special needs — the answer is simple — computers when correctly leveraged can serve to make up for gaps in our physical ability — and in time help us go over and beyond what might be considered normal at a fixed point in time.
With the above in hand, one way to answer the question What advancements might we see might be to step back and look back over the last 25 years to see how far we have come — and then try to extrapolate from there.
When I started in the world of computing 25 years ago, my computer workstation was about 50 times slower than the phone in my pocket and had a 50th the memory of an average smart phone. It also had less than 1% the network band-width we are used to today. And more importantly, it was tethered to a corner of my office. Yet, that computer opened up the world of digital information — I found to my delight that as more and more information came online, it immediately became available for electronic processing, and consequently, readily accessible via a number of modalities such as speech and Braille.
The same principles apply today — except that we now have the ability to process and transform vast amounts of data in comparison. And with computing now in our pockets, rather than being tethered to a desk, our ability to apply its benefits to the real world have gone up significantly.
Thus today, we can manipulate visual data captured by our cameras, or auditory signals recorded by our microphones in real-time. What we might do with this ability is only limited by our imagination!
Here are a few innovations that one can imagine:
For the blind:

Step-by-step walking directions — both indoors and outdoors.

Instant access to all visual signage (indoors and outdoors) — with automatic language translation as an added bonus.

Real-time object and scene recognition.

No-barrier access to all visually presented information.

For the deaf:

Instant captioning of all spoken conversations (with translation as an added bonus).

For users with physical mobility issues:

Your friendly personal robot to do your every bidding.

Notice that in each of the above, computing technology makes the world more accessible by enhancing the user's abilities. Further more, notice that users with special needs are but early adopters of these technologies; when perfected, each of the above turn into technological affordances that can help everyone.

You have many accomplishments to your name – which of these is closest to your heart?TVR: My PhD thesis leveraged the availability of display-independent electronic information to produce good audio-formatted output. The insights gained during that work — namely:

Electronic information is display-independent

Electronic documents that are more than just What You See Is What You Get — namely, Electronic documents that are machine-readable and processable are far richer

And that there is much to discover and invent in the realm of eyes-free information access

continue to underpin all of my work.

What kind of challenges did you face during your growing years? Do you remember any incidence which helped you to face these challenges effectively?TVR: I'll enumerate a couple of instances, outline how I solved them, and derive a general recipe that appears to work in my experience.
Problem: Read And Write Math Lecture Notes In Braille.
Context: India, early 1980's.

I tried tracking down the Nemeth Braille code for Math that I had heard of — failed after sending mail to various organizations in the US and UK.

I learnt Braille at the age of 16, and was not very fast at reading Braille.

I needed to be able to take notes in class and have them for later reading — these would be the only learning material I had — at the time I did not have access to resources like RFB&D (now Learning Ally) or Bookshare.

Solution: During academic year 1982–83 (11th grade High School) I learnt math entirely by ear – with my brother reading me the textbooks at home. In summer of 1983, I took a few weeks to develop a more manageable solution.
Problem Definition: Define a Braille code that would let me both read and write detailed class-notes efficiently.
Initial Trials

Immediately after learning Braille in summer 1982, I had a Rubik's cube marked in Braille and solved it — so I was convinced Braille would be very useful.

During the summer of 1982, I took an 8-week course in German and tried out Braille in the classroom, found that Braille was useful to write down words and their meaning.

Based on the above, the solution I was designing had the following pre-requisites:

The final solution needed to be fast enough to write detailed class-notes (including math notation)using a stylus and slate.

I needed to read fast enough to match what I had been used to when reading print.

Final Solution: I created my own Braille shorthand by:

Assigning syllables to the various Braille characters.

Dropping all vowels when writing.

Designing the code to minimize the number of dots used.

Assigning specific Braille codes for Math escapes such as start subscript and start superscript.

Leaving enough space in the code to be able to spontaneously design new notation e.g., when the Professor in class introduces a new Math concept along with its associated visual notation, I should be able to assign symbols in my personal Braille code that mirrored that notation.

Applying The Solution During academic year 1983–1984, I used the above code in class and refined it. Because the code was specifically designed for classroom use, I managed with a few refinements to write all my class notes in Braille using a slate and stylus, and at the end of the year had all the written material I needed for independent revision before the exams.

Eyes-Free Computing

I started in 1990 at Cornell using a PC running IBM Screenreader that I used to login to Unix workstations.

I became proficient with Emacs while doing my PhD work on AsTeR.

I used the lessons learnt to build Emacspeak I now use Emacspeak for everything.

High-Level Recipe

Given a problem, find something that works.

If it doesn't work well, clearly articulate what doesn't work, rathre than saying It doesn't work.

Articulating what doesn't work is the first step to fixing the problem.

Fix what doesn't work; if it is not fixable, build a better solution that works.

What are the two things you want to learn and why?TVR: Things I like learning:

I will never get tired of learning languages; Mandarin, Japanese and Spanish are on my list — I can speak a few words of each for now.

I find the ideas behind quantum computing fascinating.

What are your other hobbies?TVR: Recreational mathematics, solving puzzles and reading.

What advice would you give to our community who are interested in programming?TVR: Advice on programming

Programming is about communicating your ideas clearly and succinctly to the machine, with no inherent ambiguity.

In that sense, the first step toward learning to/program/ well is to learn to write clearly when communicating with humans.

Focus on learning to program, and dont get distracted by the underlying tools you use to program.

Learn at least a few programming languages, picking one from languages that teach different programming styles, e.g., functional vs object-oriented programming.

Once you've mastered programming, make sure you pick the tools that work for you — well-designed tools that are optimized to your style of working can make a huge difference.

Any special message for our community?TVR: Message to the community:

Dont let your special situation define who you are — the world will always see someone with a disability as a blind mathematician or a deaf psychologist — but that doesn't mean you have to see yourself in those terms.

And to put things in balance, each of us brings a special, individualized perspective to any given problem, and if your special abilities give you a leg up, dont be ashamed to use it. As an example, I work on eyes-free interfaces, and the fact that I cannot see gives me an early advantage in that I am a full-time user of everything I build.

T.V Raman Interview

A must-have book for families of children with disabilities.