Driving Google’s search for access

I’m originally from India, although I now live in California. When people asked me about my name I explain that the T comes from the first letter of my home town and the V from my father’s name. That seems pretty cool to me.

I’ve always been interested in and fascinated not just by numbers, but mathematical concepts.
So I studied maths to a high level at the Indian Institute of Technology where, in 1987, I took my first class in computer programming. Even then, maths and science were big in India. By 1990, I’d moved to America to study at Cornell University. It was at that point I had a big “Aha!” moment and
realised not only that I wanted to move properly across from purely abstract  maths to computing, but also that I was beginning to think of myself as an “accessibility evangelist”. So I did a PhD in computer science.

At Cornell, I developed a very good and intuitive way of making maths documents talk for my own purposes but when I graduated from there and went to work at Deck Research I decided to concentrate on the bigger access picture. This now starts to get a bit technical. Screenreaders look at visual information and try to turn it into audio. I wanted to get at the information itself and make it talk, so working from the inside rather than the outside. I started quite simply by
developing a talking computer-based calendar. My starting point was saying to the calendar, “look, guy, I’m listening to you, talk to me,” but it was the thing itself that was talking without any extra software intervention.

By 1995, Adobe’s PDF format was being increasingly widely developed but there were huge problems in terms of its accessibility. Adobe asked me to go and work for them to sort out problems with it for blind people. For four years, I did a lot of work on the structure of PDF files. After I left, people continued to work with the PDF format so that the majority of PDF documents are now much more accessible.

Then, from 1999, I worked at IBM, looking at improving access to parts of the web, concentrating in particular on how
online forms you’re asked to fill in could be made more usable. In 2005, I came here to Google. What I like about being here is that Google hires a bunch of smart people and just throws them in the fish tank. So I’ve worked on something called Accessible Search, which will take you directly to user-friendly accessible sites.

I’m not content with the status quo. I believe that the computer industry hasn’t created enough alternatives. Users need alternatives.