Sudeshana Bhattacharya, a simple inspired woman who never gave up to the difficulties and societal differences. A visually impaired person who had a story to write, send a message to the world and inspire young minds.
A woman with sheer confidence and a constant smile on her face, worked hard and proved that even a set back such as vision impairment can not stop her from succeeding and achieving her dreams.
The love and support she got from her family and colleagues helped her in securing the only position available at RBI (Reserve Bank of India) Kolkata.
To understand her journey better, we asked a few questions to her and as inspiring as her words are, her responses bring a lot about our society into perspective. Makes you wonder what is the worth of taking small yet crucial rights of an ambitious person away when these privileges are misused at every step?
Her inspiring words shed light on societal perception of vision impairment. Her story will make you think — Should people be denied of opportunities because of their abilities?
To get to know her, she was first asked to introduce herself.
As she likes herself to be introduced we would say, she is the proud elder daughter of Mr. & Mrs. Bhattacharya, an oracle certified developer, who worked at Wipro before joining RBI Kolkata. She did her Post Graduation in Economics and Ravindra Sangeet.
Moving forward she was asked about her roles at RBI.
With her bright smile she admired her work at RBI and said how interesting her job role has been. The humble support of her colleagues and her interest in the work. She mentions how there was reluctance in approaching her for menial tasks and how her capabilities were judged at every step because of which one fine day she approached her senior and asked for a desk job where assistive technology could be brought into use and the software she was comfortable with, could be used.
Once achieving an officer level job her work environment changed which was then reflected in how she was being treated, it surely helped her in staying motivated. Her work was impeccable and nobody dared question that.
Her inspirational journey represents the dynamics of work culture and its issues, how by being more inclusive, by taking the first step to accepting and vouching for a person’s capability turns out to be a beautiful path for evident growth.
It indeed is a dynamic world out there and to cope with it technology has aided us on every step, hence the next question for Sudeshana was how technology had helped her in her job?
One such helpful tool for her has been Kibo, which offers support in accessing any printed, handwritten or digital content in audio. She is able to access her documents in Bengali, English and Hindi. Since her job requires her to read a lot of documents, Kibo helps her access them independently, and without barriers. She also uses JAWS and NVDA screen-readers to access and navigate computers and her work.
Challenges and obstacles are a part of every inspirational story and to realize the indifference to a person’s capability based on unrelated factors are a part of every visually impaired person. Sudeshna is the motivation for every such person, and when asked about her challenges she said she was often called out with questions like “how will she even work?”, “will she be able to cope up?” to an extent that she had to let go of her passion for coding. But in-spite of all of these, she was not disappointed because she believes life always has something good in store for you.
Above and beyond discrimination for the blind or any other especially abled person lies an inclusive world, filled with ambition, diligence and hope for a better future. Technology exists to make everyday lives better for every person and take this generation further.
Kibo is happy to present to you all, ‘The Superstars’ Series, where we highlight the journeys of people shining against all odds. Click here to watch Sudeshana’s entire story.
Do let us know whom you want to listen to next by simply writing to us at kibo@trestlelabs.com. We will be back again with our next guest soon.
Until then, be inclusive, respect differences 💙
Trestle Labs is an Assistive Technology initiative, empowering the blind and the visually impaired community towards inclusive Education and Employment by building solutions that help them listen, translate and digitize any kind of printed, handwritten and digital content independently across 60+ languages.
Kibo has so far empowered 65,000+ individuals across 22 countries with more than 20 million pages worth of content accessed so far by users.