When you aren’t happy with the path others laid out for you, pave your own!
You can turn your life around if you follow the fundamentals: stay curious, try new things, and discard the norms. This is a story where this couple did just that!
Anuja Gautam and Jayaram Lamichhane, a visually impaired couple born and raised in Nepal, had a similar yet distinct childhood experience. Now living in Denmark and the US, respectively, they have come a long way from what they could see themselves doing with their lives as kids.
Born partially sighted, ten-year-old Anuja had never imagined herself pursuing a tech career. Growing up, she believed that she could only pursue subjects with a theoretical base like Social Studies. Those around her would constantly push her towards these subjects. However, as she matured, she realized that she never enjoyed them.
Until her third grade, Anuja attended Shree Amar Singh Model Secondary School, where her teachers and classmates would aid her to get around. She would use tools like a magnifying glass to read the texts. However, with her vision deteriorating, she was moved to Laboratory School in Kirtipur in her fourth grade, where she began learning Braille. Things were going pretty well until she got into middle school. Math and Science were gradually declining from her coursework, emphasizing Social Studies.
Jay, on the other hand, was born with good eyesight. However, when he was eight, an accident took away his first eye, and at the age of eighteen, he lost his second eye to glaucoma. Since he experienced normal schooling, subjects like Mathematics naturally charmed him, and he never looked back.
By the time Jay finished high school, he was blind with no visual perception, whereas Anuja had moved to Denmark to be with her parents in ninth grade. By then, they had found each other on social media and had begun talking and sharing their experiences. Anuja realized how much she had missed out on learning because of the curriculum design.
“I remember feeling like I should have stayed in the government school. At least they failed you at the end of the year, so you had to put in the effort and learn, but with private schools, they always pass you fearing losing their income source. It was gratifying for me as a child who saw good grades without much effort, but a real shock and disappointment to look back upon.”
Jay, who loves Mathematics, is disappointed that the visually impaired community activists believe that the students should not be taught complicated things and that Mathematics should be removed from the blind school curriculum.
“The activists in the blind community are doing a wonderful job pushing for many good things. But they are also depriving students of their right to learn. That is why we don’t see blind people in government positions and public service commissions.”
Born out of all these frustrations and the desire to share their first-hand journey was ‘Colorful Shadows’. Colorful Shadows because everyone seems to have their assumptions about blind people. People view every basic thing the visually impaired do as an achievement. They are stuck in the delight of a blind person making their meal. Even though their individualism is always within the shadows, the way they shine within themselves and the light they spark is colorful.
Colorful Shadows took its form when Jay was off to India searching for opportunities after high school. He was taking his first leap into programming at an institute in Kerela and got an opportunity to learn about the Blind Community in the US. He got selected in a training program where he could learn the basics of leading a solitary life as a blind person and maintaining himself. However, it was on him to pay for the flight tickets and food for the entire duration of the training, which he couldn’t afford.
On the other hand, Anuja was busy adjusting to Denmark by learning the language and familiarizing herself with Danish culture. Just then, she heard about the NRN Convention happening in Copenhagen. Jay and Anuja decided that the event could be a way to get their vision for Colorful Shadows kicked off and, if possible, collect funding for Jay’s training.
During the conference, Anuja raised a pledge of twenty lakhs Nepali rupees for Colorful Shadows. Jay could go to the US for the training on an M1 visa after an individual pledged a separate sum of 3000 USD for him.
Jay managed to seek help from the network of Nepali and the Blind community in the US and got in contact with a local politician, who helped him get a green card since he could have a better life there. Jay has been living in an apartment on his own for the past four years. He plans to invite his parents to live with him, where Jay himself will be supporting them.
“I could never imagine this kind of life in Nepal, but here, these things are normal because accessibility is a requirement and is regulated. But the most important part about being here is the acceptance. There is acceptance for who you are, and what your (dis)abilities are.”
Anuja adds, “Besides, the access to resources matters. In Nepal, the Braille books used to be expensive, heavy, and immobile. It wasn’t possible to make their best use, even with the best of intentions. However, here we use a sort of electronic Braille where you write and erase things in Braille, which also has a screen for other people to read. The government provides it to us, including a full PC setup with a printer. Jay and I each have our own sets.”
Jay did an accessibility testing certification training from the Blind Institute of Technology. Accessibility is an issue, especially in the context of Nepal. When Jay and Anuja came for a visit to Nepal in 2021, Jay met a few bank managers and brought the issue forward, offering his skills as an accessibility tester and showing them how they could make their applications more inclusive to everyone. They seemed to be appreciative of the fact and were open to ideas. Still, the developer community, in general, turns a blind eye to the need and only considers it as an afterthought.
Anuja emphasizes, “Especially in the case of things like bank applications, it’s almost impossible to reach the developers. They consider doing anything related to accessibility a big favor when it’s a part of their job.”
Jay adds that if they visit the banks themselves to try and have a proper conversation without prior notice, they’re shooed off by the guards because of the assumption that blind people are only there to beg for money.
Jay, in the course of his employment in the US, has gone from working at Dish Network as a technical support engineer to doing thorough accessibility testing there. His job was to ensure that the products the developers built would have good labels, worked just as well with a keyboard as with a mouse, across different systems with different keyboard layouts, different browsers, operating systems, screens, screen reader software, and so on.
He had also received full-time employment at the Department of Equal Opportunities for the State of Florida after his accessibility testing certification. There, he was working on a project with the ‘Organization for the Blind’, through which he served major companies like Google, Facebook, and the likes by offering first-hand feedback on their products.
Jay also does programming work from time to time. During their free times, Anuja and Jay get together virtually to solve a new programming challenge, which of course, is made possible by screen readers.
Jay uses JAWS for most of his work as he mostly only uses PC. In contrast, Anuja, being a bit of a gadget freak, uses a combination of iPad, iPhone, and laptops equally, and thus uses Voiceover by Apple for her Apple devices, whereas NVDA(NonVisual Desktop Access), free, open-source software that also provides Nepali language support, for her PC.
Anuja also loves playing games on her phone. Thus whenever she encounters an update, the first thing she usually checks is the accessibility support. The same applies when she tries out a new gadget or an application.
“It’s crazy how lowly accessibility is prioritized. Even with gaming, so much could be done to make our experiences better.”
Their biggest pledge to the developer community is not to make accessibility an afterthought; instead, treat it as one of the major project requirements, almost as if a life depends on it because sometimes it just might.
Through Colorful Shadows, Anuja and Jay are currently giving back to the new generation of blind students in Nepal with their combined journey of the educational system and their professional prowess so far. Apart from the initial funding they received, they are running the organization out of their pockets. In their free time, they tutor students currently in middle school to ensure that they don’t miss mathematics like Anuja had to.
“If we can help them have a normal educational experience, we would be on the right track by the time they are in high school.”
Further, they are planning on taking their investments in their past students ahead by providing them with a course covering the basics of the web and accessibility testing. With the right accessibility testing skills and certification, they are employable right away. Their goal with Colorful Shadows is to make sure they have a job to help them build a better life for themselves.
Jay adds, “I’m a self-taught developer. I started doing Python and web development myself. What someone did teach me was the basics of the web — and HTML, and that’s exactly what I want to teach them. Once they know the basics and where to start, there are countless resources on the internet they can build upon.”
For 2022/23, they plan to bring in professional trainers and volunteers to conduct these sessions. They will also give graded projects to work on, out of which the winner would receive a cash prize and work their newfound skills to build a website for Colorful Shadows.
“It’s not that we can’t build the website, but that we haven’t had to. However, this would be a good way to get to it as this would allow the participants to have a bit of a real-world experience.”
In the meantime, Anuja always wondered what she could do to earn some pocket money. One day she found out about transcription and joined Tolk Danmark for the job. She has been doing English, Nepali, and Danish transcriptions in her free time. Jay too, took advantage of the remote work opportunity.
Currently, Anuja is in her last semester of high school at the Copenhagen Adult Education Center, whereas Jay continues the transcription job. They are both starting their Undergrad this year in August, Anuja with a Bachelor’s in Software Engineering at the IT University of Copenhagen, and Jay with Computer Science at the Community College of Denver. Both of them see building products focused on accessibility as a part of their future career plan. Jay wishes to build a product like the screen reader NVDA that provides premium JAWS-like support and make it free and open-source so that he can give something back to the blind community. Jay also adds that the first product he builds on his own would be in Anuja’s name.
Jay says, “Please never make assumptions about anyone or anything until you know it for a fact. I came from nothing to building all of this for myself and supporting my family. Still, people usually tend to get snarky and say, ‘Oh of course you’d get it, you’re blind after all.’ You can ask if you want to learn more about people, but please don’t make snide remarks about anyone.”
Anuja adds, “If there’s anyone from the blind community reading/listening to this, please don’t assume that we could get here because I had my parents in Denmark. Sure, that was a big privilege, but that’s not the end of it, and Jay is the living example of that. We’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into this. People usually like to reduce it by saying it’s extraordinary and out of the world, but all it’s doing is perpetuating the belief that blind people cannot do anything and are worth nothing. And we are trying to change that by providing you with the kind of mentorship and tutoring we couldn’t have. Being curious about the opportunities is the first step to everything, and once you do, continue putting out the work, and seek help from the community. You can all do it. We can all do it.”
This article was written by Dipti Gautam, the President of Nepali Women in Computing for Nepali Women in Computing — CELEBRATE.
