AsianScientist (Jun. 11, 2025) – As a child growing up in a small village in Karnataka, India, in the late 1990s, Vidhya Y remembers being constantly told that science wasn’t for her. After all, she couldn’t read the mathematical formulae in her textbooks, nor study the diagrams her teachers drew in the classroom. Completely blind from birth, Vidhya could only learn by relying on what she could hear, feel and memorize.
“At the time, few people with visual impairments progressed in math or science beyond grade 5,” said Vidhya, in an interview with Asian Scientist Magazine. “So it made quite a media splash to be the first such person to not only make grade 10 in a mainstream school, but to also major in math, pass the state boards with top marks and graduate with a computer science degree.”
Her public successes were floated on waves of private struggles. She remembers the piles of rejected applications to schools, colleges and jobs on grounds of her disability, despite her stellar grades. Her repeated appeals to academic and state authorities for accommodations like extra time in examinations and assistive technologies for coursework often fell on deaf ears. Many would ask: why not just do something else? Can you really keep up with the others?
But Vidhya persisted, though not alone. Her parents and friends introduced volunteer tutors who helped fill the gaps from her early education to college. In what she remembers as “her first experience advocating for the community,” Vidhya and a cousin would knock on the doors of politicians until they gave ground. It paid off when Karnataka’s state government agreed to extend the official duration of public exams not just for Vidhya, but all students like her.
Vidhya would go on to complete a master’s degree in programming at the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore (IIIT-Bangalore), and spend a year interning with Microsoft Research India. “That internship made me realize that not only was a career in science rewarding, but possible for a blind person to succeed in,” said Vidhya. “It was only that other people believed they couldn’t.”
Data Gaps
A 2023 report from the World Health Organization notes that about 1.3 billion people worldwide live with some form of disability. However, there’s limited data—particularly in Asia—on the extent of their access to science education or related professions.
Broader national demographic reports, like those of Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower, offer a glimpse. Between 2022 and 2023, 87 percent of employed resident people with disabilities (PWDs) worked in the service industry in Singapore. Of these, only 4.5 percent worked in the professional services sector—which includes both STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and non-STEM highly skilled professions.
Vidhya shares more granular data from India: “Nearly a third of the world’s blind population resides in India today, with over 1.1 million of them of school-going age. Yet, while there isn’t detailed data available, based on our own secondary sources, we estimate fewer than 50 people with vision impairments across India have taken up STEM at a tertiary level to date.”
Her estimates of the national population are supported by the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB), a UK-registered global alliance of eye health advocates comprising charities, hospitals, academic institutes, professional bodies and corporations. The IAPB calculated that about 9.2 million of the world’s 43 million persons with blindness resided in India as of 2020.
Rethinking Education
Resolving to change society’s biases against PWD’s abilities to perform in STEM fields and to “create jobs, instead of begging for them,” Vidhya teamed up with Supriya Dey, a friend and research assistant from her time at Microsoft. She also reached out to her mentor, Professor Amit Prakash, convenor of IIIT-Bangalore’s Centre for Accessibility in the Global South. With them she co-founded Vision Empower (VE) in 2017: a nonprofit aiming to develop inclusive STEM education for children with visual impairment.
“Our qualitative research identified three main gaps to focus on: accessible, formal STEM learning materials; teacher training in STEM education for the blind; and affordable assistive technologies for the Indian context,” Dey, now the managing trustee of VE, told Asian Scientist Magazine.
While many tools and techniques had already been developed by local and international organizations in the disability education space, “everyone was doing their own thing, and the teachers themselves weren’t clear on what was out there,” said Dey. “We felt VE could help bring everyone together to create joint solutions using a participatory design format.”
Based on consultations with teachers, universities, STEM associations, global education experts, tech companies and government bodies, VE developed a comprehensive suite of inclusive STEM educational programs and resources for students with visual impairment. Available for free, their modules are designed to meet government STEM education requirements and have been rolled out to 139 schools for the blind in India, said Vidhya.
“We prioritized a Universal Design for Learning approach to create physical and digital resources flexible enough to be adapted to different learners—not just those with visual impairment, but also other forms of disability,” added Dey. “Our resources also assist teachers and schools in digital literacy, experiential STEM teaching methods, and the creation of their own context-specific teaching materials, such as tactile diagrams and models.”
Such resources include Subodha, a digital learning management system designed for teachers with visual impairments; Hexis, a locally-produced low-cost refreshable Braille display designed for both child and adult readers; and Antara, a cloud-based, multilingual text-to-Braille conversation software that teachers can use to create reading content for students on the Hexis system.
“Overall, feedback from teachers and auditors across different states has been encouraging, but the broader impact of our work—whether we’ll see these children entering higher education or professions in STEM—will take years to quantify,” said Dey. “There’s still much more to be done.”
Redesigning workplaces
Across the continent, at the University of Tokyo (UTokyo), Japan, another team is putting its energies together to make a rather neglected area of STEM inclusive of PWDs: research labs.
“In Japan, the Disability Law 2016 mandated that educational institutes make reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities. Since then, I would say the number of such students enrolled in Japan’s universities has increased fourfold,” said Shigehiro Namiki, an associate professor who leads UTokyo’s Inclusive Design Laboratory (IDL). “However, while what constitutes ‘reasonable accommodations’ for the classroom is now very established, the same can’t be said for the laboratory.”
Originally a biologist focused on insect life, Namiki changed his research focus after an autoimmune neurological condition led him to become a wheelchair user from 2015 onward. While his upper body remains fully mobile, the impediments he faces in the average laboratory are similar to those in daily life: much of a lab’s architecture and equipment are built for users who can stand, walk around and reach for things with steady hands.
To improve the accessibility of labs for people like him, Namiki started the IDL in 2020. As physical accessibility is one of their focus areas, Namiki’s team has redesigned common elements of the lab, such as height-adjustable touchless sinks and emergency showers with wheelchairfriendly soft borders.
“However, these elements are quite expensive—we’re working on making them more cost-effective for wider use in other labs, universities and elementary schools,” said Namiki. “Also, while we’re currently focused on the perspectives of persons in wheelchairs, our goal is to make the laboratory accessible to all people.”
The IDL is also developing a free web-based Student Experiment Support Tool to help teachers assess students with disabilities and figure out what specific accommodations might enable them to do independent experiments in school labs.
“One of our goals is for every student with disability in Japan to be able to pursue a STEM career,” said Namiki.
Top-Down Bridges
Although slow-moving, policy measures like Japan’s Disability Law and South Korea’s Act on Welfare of PWDs reflect an increasing interest among Asian governments to prevent discrimination against PWDs in employment and education. Initiatives like SG Enable, an agency set up by Singapore’s Ministry of Social and Family Development, are beginning to see the fruits of their efforts to improve PWD inclusion in the workforce and other aspects of society.
“There’s room for greater representation of PWDs in STEM, as they bring diverse, innovative perspectives and unique abilities,” said Edward Chew, director of Service Development (Employment) at SG Enable, in an interview with Asian Scientist Magazine. “The key challenge impacting access for PWDs—not just in STEM—is changing the mindsets of employers, and ensuring more people value and recognize the strengths of PWDs.”
The agency partners with companies in STEM fields who have been accredited by the agency for their PWD-inclusive hiring and workplace culture. In August 2024, SG Enable, the SIM People Development Fund and the Institute of Technical Education, Singapore, launched the Enabling Pathway Programme (EPP) as a formal initiative to link students with disabilities with technical positions in high-growth sectors, such as land transport engineering, that demand a significant workforce.
“The EPP also aims to enhance matches between students with disabilities, their course of study and job opportunities; and support them throughout their journey from education to employment,” Chew added.
Guiding Hearts
For Noraishah Mydin Haji Abdul Aziz, the question of better inclusion for PWDs in the sciences has a very personal answer: mentorship. Beyond political or technological solutions, at its core, inclusion requires the support of those in the field to guide those wishing to enter it.
“Whether in kindergarten or university, you need people who care about you, who see the unique person you are, and who are willing to find the best path for your skills and passions,” said Noraishah, an associate research fellow at the Department of Biomedical Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, in an interview with Asian Scientist Magazine.
In a cramped faculty office in Serdang, Malaysia, she displays her “favourite photo in the world”: a crisp electron micrograph of a mouse embryo, its budding spinal cord half-closed. Today, it’s known that defects during that closing process are what lead to congenital conditions such as spina bifida: the one Noraishah was born with.
“I’m a lifelong patient, but I’m also a scientist; maybe the only person in the world with spina bifida and a PhD in it,” she said.
Since infancy, mobility aids and repeated hospital visits were a regular aspect of Noraishah’s life; so too were rejections from academic institutions. Nonetheless, she said that dedicated teachers supported her decision to pursue the sciences. She became, in her words, “the first wheelchairbound graduate from a pure science course in a Malaysian public university” in 1998. Later, mentors such as Andrew Copp and Nicholas Greene, developmental neurobiologists at the University College London (UCL), UK, would be among the few to open their laboratory’s doors to her.
The micrograph, which Noraishah captured in Copp and Greene’s lab, was the culmination of years of hard work: not just of research, but also of fighting for her right to do science, made possible in part by those who guided her way.
“Andy and Nick were like my Yoda and Obi-Wan,” said Noraishah. “Copp’s lab was the first at UCL to accept a student with a disability like mine; while Nick’s unwavering support—even until today— really sharpened my skills as a researcher and kept me going through years of hard work.”
Today, Noraishah provides the same mentoring she received to her own cohort of students, including those with disabilities.
“Science is ultimately a meeting of the minds,” said Noraishah. “As long as you’re a sentient human being—able to learn and to understand the world around you—no one should deny you access to the pursuit of scientific knowledge, no matter what your circumstances are.”
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This article was first published in the print version of Asian Scientist Magazine, January 2025.
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Design: Shelly Liew / Asian Scientist Magazine
Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine.
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