Vision-Aid founder Revathy and Ramakrishna Raju are on their annual visit to the various Vision-Aid Centers in India. Their first stop was Vision-Aid's Center at Sankara Netralaya in Chennai. This relatively new center which was just inaugurated a year ago during their last visit, has taken off very well. They had the wonderful opportunity to meet with the staff and discuss ongoing work and new , upcoming initiatives. 

Aditi Shah, one of Vision-Aid's former student in the programming course, graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology with a Masters degree in Computer Science and Cyber Security. Beyond being a former student of Vision-Aid, she has many connections with Vision-Aid family. Sonal Patel , her mentor at Vision-Aid continues to be Aditi's mentor even today. Prof Santosh Vempala of Georgia Tech, who serves on the board of Vision-Aid has also been her mentor and guide there for the past 1.5 years. He and his family have been with Aditi on her journey with their love and support. 

Vision-Aid is thrilled to annonce the establishment of Vision-Aid National Resource Center in Delhi. This was made possible by Boston Natives Ram and Meetu Gupta. This resource center will be fully functional by January 2020. The resource center will serve the visually impaired population of Delhi and surrounding area.  The center will provide a comprehensive range of services and devices for the visually impaired and will aim to enable, educate and empower the visually impaired in the area.

Every year, I-Stem, IIIT Bangalore, Vision Aid, Vision Empower and XRCVC bring participants with and without disabilities to code/hack on high-impact projects and learn from each other. With over 150 participants, 7 universities and 11 corporates having participated in the two sessions of the hackathon in 2018 and 2019. Vision-Aid is excited to extend invitation on behalf of Inclusive Stem Confluence 2020 organizing team. The Inclusive Stem Confluence 2020 Hackathon comes to you in an expanded format. The event is divided into three tracks.

Vision-Aid hosted a panel of experts on Accessibility Testing at the Boston Accessibility Conference, an annual event that attract leaders from many fields who are interested in supporting accessibility, universal design and making the digital world a more universal place for persons of all abilities.

2019’s conference was held on Saturday November 2^nd at the Fidelity Offices in downtown Boston. Vision-Aid co-sponsored the conference and hosted a keynote panel on “Accessible Accessibility Testing” and an information session on “Using technology to create wearable navigational devices for the blind”.

Pallavi Deshpande is an AIF Clinton Fellow. Her AIF fellowship took her to Vision-Aid's center at Vizag. During her visit she was able to serve and observe the Vision-Aid's new scholars’ program that was piloted this year which prepares young men and women from rural areas through a residential, intensive 6-month skills program for workplace readiness.

Its that time of the year again when fall is in the air, trees in New England are bright and beautiful, India is respledant for Diwali and the anticipation of holidays and celebration is around the corner. Vision-Aid wishes all it's well wishers a happy start of holiday season. 

In 2018, Vision-Aid formed a partnership with Aravind Eye Hospitals in Madurai. In January of 2019 the Vision-Aid resource center was formally launched at Aravind Hospital. Some great work has since been done at the resource center since then. Here are some hightlights of the latest strides made at the center.

Bhargav and Pranav are two of the early blind students of Vision-Aid Python Programming course. Bhargav is now also an instructor. They recently attended the Pycon National Confernce in Chennai. PyCon is the largest annual gathering for the Python programming community that uses and develops the open-source Python programming language.

Vision-Aid runs many programs which help train school teachers to become more inclusive in their classrooms that enables them to support better learning outcomes for their visually impaired students.

The Vision-Aid team is pleased to introduce some of the students from the first class of their new, path-breaking technical training course on Digital Accessibility Testing which was launched on 17th August 2019.