Industry Accessibility Headquarters New Delhi Type of business Private | Website oswald.foundation Founded 2016 | |
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Founder Anand Chowdhary
Nishant Gadihoke Key people Anand Chowdhary (CEO)
Nishant Gadihoke (CTO)
Mahendra Raghuwanshi (COO) Products Valmiki
Agastya
Shravan | ||
Interview with anand chowdhary ceo oswald foundation
Oswald Foundation is an Indian accessibility technology company based in New Delhi that build products for individuals suffering from disabilities. It was established in 2016 by then 18-year-old Anand Chowdhary and 15-year-old Nishant Gadihoke after their product, Oswald Extension, won an event at the AngelHack hackathon in New Delhi. In an interview with The Huffington Post, Chowdhary said that he believes "Oswald can enable a Web 4.0 -- a web centered around accessibility and equality".
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Oswald Foundation is named in honor of Oswald Berkhan, the German physician who first identified dyslexia in 1881.
History
Chowdhary and Gadihoke started working together as students at The Mother's International School, as part of their computer club, MINET, of which Chowdhary was President. Chowdhary shared his idea of developing an accessibility tool with Gadihoke, and they decided to develop the extension during the AngelHack Delhi 2016.
After the development of the tool, Chowdhary and Gadihoke purchased the domain oswald.foundation on August 14, 2016 and founded Oswald Foundation on India's Independence Day on August 15, 2016. Oswald Foundation won an award at Startup India Rocks in Bengaluru and is a part of IBM's Global Entrepreneur Program. They are also incubated in the London and Berlin-based EYE Focus Accelerator, a startup accelerator program for companies developing for living with visual impairment.
Valmiki
Previously known as Oswald itself, Valmiki is a browser extension based on independent research done by the British Dyslexia Association and the World Wide Web Consortium to allow people with dyslexia or visual impairment access the web. Users with dyslexia can change the typeface to Open Dyslexic and colors to dyslexia-friendly colors, and visually impaired users can listen to the content available on a webpage. It also allows users to customize a webpage's typography and style based on their reading preferences. It is a free and open-source software available in the Chrome Web Store.
Shravan
Shravan is an operating system for smartphones and tablet computers based on the Android mobile platform. It uses a vibrational and speech feedback as its primary user interface and has special features that makes it more accessible than regular smartphone operating systems. It is also reportedly the first smartphone operating system with built-in Digital India technologies like Aadhaar integration and Unified Payments Interface payments and works in over 25 native Indian languages. Shravan is expected to part of a publicly-available hardware device in 2018.