Paying it Forward
Santiago Velasquez was born with vision impairment so his family migrated from Colombia to Australia with the sole purpose of giving him more life opportunities, and he is now paying it forward in more ways than one.
Twenty years on and now an electrical engineering student at QUT, on any given week Santiago is also an entrepreneur, researcher and an Australian representative to the United Nations advocating rights for people with disabilities.
This week he is also a budding philanthropist helping others starting life as he did to achieve their own independence.
Santiago worked with the QUT Science and Engineering Faculty to identify disability-accessible technology — 32 iPads — from stock turnovers and donate these to Comfenalco Quindío — a social support service in his Colombian home town.
“In Colombia, if you went to where I’m originally from, Quindío, there is no school that has any resources to assist people who have a vision impairment,” Santiago says.
“There is only one centre that has a few pieces of equipment that can print out Braille, and magnifiers for people to see documents, but it’s all up to the teacher, student and parents to figure it out if they want something.
“The biggest barrier is that, because it’s a developing nation and because the income isn’t as good as it can be, then the resources — because of their price — most people don’t have them.”
Digital access to greater potential
By donating the iPads, which have built-in screen readers, Santiago said he hopes Colombians with vision impairment will better realise their potential.
“I hope people realise that even if you have a disability you can pursue any degree that you see fit, you can pursue any path that you want,” Santiago said.
Santiago moved to Australia in 2009 with his father Cesar Velasquez, mother Maria Elena Hurtado and brother Camilo Velasquez — who is also studying electrical engineering as well as applied mathematics at QUT.
“Ever since I can remember, Mum and Dad always inspired my brother and me to assist others,” Santiago said.
“When we immigrated to Australia, we set a goal — as soon as we settle, and as soon as we can do so, we would help other people with disabilities that don’t have access to accessible resources to pursue an education.
“If I didn’t come to Australia, all of the opportunities that I have wouldn’t have come my way.
“I’ve been able to talk about disability rights in various forums, I’ve been able to pick my own degree and represent Australia at international forums that, if we were in Colombia, I don’t believe would have come my way.”
Greater independence for people living with disability
As a UN ambassador for people with vision impairment, there is a bigger theme that needs to be discussed when talking about disability, according to Santiago.
“The small sort of section that everybody tends to focus on is what we need to give people to assist them to be independent,” Santiago said.
“I’m looking from the perspective of — what does society need to change so that people with disabilities can choose whichever path they see fit?
“If we are able to provide access to a digital world, which is the world in which we live in, we enable people with disability to choose their own path independently of what society says.
“Kids with disabilities can say, ‘yes, I can study mathematics, I can pursue a degree in law, I can work, I can travel independently, I can learn and I can access resources that might not be at my library because I can access them through the internet’.”
Developing new technologies for people with vision-impairment
Outside of his studies, Santiago works on projects for people with vision impairment that address daily tasks most of us take for granted — such as using public transport.
He is founder and CEO of two technology start-ups: Hailo, a system that remotely alerts the bus driver when a person with vision impairment wants to board the bus, and EyeSyght, a tactile visual display to help the vision-impaired access graphical content.
“With EyeSyght, the problem we’re solving has to do with accessing information if you’re blind, and if you want to work with anything that is graphical,” Santiago said.
“The only way in which you can interact with anything from your computer that is graphical is to print it out. There is no other way for you to understand what a picture looks like, what a graph looks like, what a map looks like, and so on and so forth.
“So I said, ‘what if we can develop the display that, when you look at it, it shows you the map, the picture, but when somebody touches the surface of it, they can feel that picture of the map, charts, ETC.’
“We’ve been working for the past one-and-a-half years with the support of QUT, Vision Australia, Google, MIT and other companies and organisations around the world to develop this technology that hopefully will enable people with vision impairment to access whatever it is that they want to work with, and pursue any field and any education they would like to pursue.
“At the moment the biggest problem when talking about disabilities is that if you don’t have access to the information, well, how are you supposed to work with it?
“I need it and there are more than 285 million people around the world who also need it, so I thought it would be a good problem to tackle.”
Others thought so too with Santiago receiving various support including a QUT bluebox Accelerator prize, project sponsorship and a Queensland Government-supported place in an MIT Innovation and Entrepreneur Bootcamp.
Making a big world smaller
In his life journey to now, Santiago says his world has opened up.
“When I was a kid, the world was massive. Now, the world is still massive but I feel like there is so much more that I can do and I hope to keep on the path that I’m on,” Santiago said.
“So I will continue doing stuff in the area of disability rights. I plan to continue with the company that I’m running and to develop the solutions that we’re working on.
“And, hopefully, continue helping people from my own country to pursue whichever path they want and to show them that it doesn’t matter if you’re disabled and it doesn’t matter what barriers are put your way.
“At the end of the day barriers don’t exist, we put them up ourselves.”
