April 17th, 2019 was great day for Vision-Aid volunteers and partners in the greater Boston area. Vision-Aid along with partner Orbit Research participated in the Accessible Technology Day at the MIT museum.  This event was part of the Cambridge Science Festival. The theme was "Accessible Technology: New Ways to Interface with the World".

On January 12, 2019 Vision-Aid and Aravind Eye Hospital, in Madurai, formally launched the Vision-Aid National Resource Center (NRC) for the visually impaired at Aravind Eye Hospital, Madurai, the world’s largest eye care system. Over 2500 patients are served daily at Aravind Eye hospital's main branch.

The Inclusive STEM Hackathon is a 24-hour hackathon where visually impaired coders and software developers, industry professionals, and engineering students come together to work on exciting and challenging projects.

This years Inclusive STEM Hackathon began on 17th January and ended on 19th January, on the campus of IIIT Bangalore. Organizers of the event included IIIT Bangalore, I-Stem, Vision-Aid, Vision Empower Trust and The Xavier’s Resource Centre for the Visually Challenged.

The event was widey covered byl Indian media. 

Vision-Aid has been working with the Lui Braille Blind School in Agra, India on a range of projects. One of these projects is a spoken English program. The classes are taught in a blended model, with the primary instruction happening virtually with one hour long classes every day, and one local assistant teacher who helps to reinforce concepts. The progress we have seen from our students has been remarkable and inspiring!

Vision-Aid held a workshop, in collaboration with it's partner, Youth4Jobs on Innovations in Mobile and Braille Technologies for the visually impaired in Bengaluru on 20th January 2019. The instructors Balaji, Justin and Manjunatha provided insights on various topics. Many trainers from Vision-Aid's partner organizations including Youth4Jobs, Samarthanam, Nethra, Aravind, Sankara Nethralaya and others attended the workshop. The knowledge and skills acquired by the participating trainers will ripple through to many others in coming months.

Vision-Aid's partnership with Aravind Hostpital in Madurai is making great strides in proving support to the visually impaired in that part of the country.

Vision-Aid is proud to announce some new ventures as the year 2018 comes to a close. 

In 2017, Vision-Aid introduced Spoken English as one of the key programs in our model. We quickly realized that while many organizations teach spoken English, the materials and methods rely heavily on visual cues which do not work for the visually impaired students. So we set out to design a custom training program in spoken English for the visually impaired that can reach visually impaired students in all settings rural and urban.

The Boston Accessibility Conference was held on last Saturday October 27th at the Fidelity Offices in downtown Boston, MA. Vision-Aid co-sponsored the conference and hosted a panel "Making MOOCs more accessible to the visually impaired" and an information session on "The Vision-Aid Model”. Vision-Aid sincerely thanks our corporate sponsors Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare for their financial support which made this event possible. We are working on making the videos available soon. Please stay tuned!

The Vision-Aid team was honored and delighted to present a memento, as a token of our deep appreciation and affection for Dr. Chuck, a legendary Coursera educator from the University of Michigan who is visiting India currently. Ms. Jayanthi, Program Coordinator for Vision-Aid’s programming course had a delightful meeting with Dr. Chuck, and expressed sincere thanks to him on behalf of all our visually impaired students who learn programming from his highly accessible, universally popular course “Programing for Everyone” taught via Coureera, which is rated by Class Central to be one of the top 20 MOOCs in the world!