Establishing AT research in the developing world is not going to be trivial, especially given the overall lack of existing scientific research capacity. Building this capacity must be based on a significant long-term investment and a commitment from the state and higher educational institutions to reward research both academically and commercially.
AT and Accessibility represent a massive breadth of work – building expertise in speech synthesizers for new languages requires a very different skill-set from building automated wheelchairs of currency readers. The most successful AT research centers have typically had connections with university, and thereby tapped into faculty with a range of interests. These have also bridged the connection between academia and industry, but from a funding perspective have almost always been kickstarted by the state. State commitments of inclusion to their vision-impaired populations cannot be realized without an investment in building an indigenous and inclusive research culture.
In an ideal case scenario, this would mean building a scenario where people can think of research as a career – from graduate studies onward either towards academic careers or industrial research positions. Given that the larger goals of building scientific research can be anything between very challenging to completely infeasible for a number of smaller countries, for the purposes of AT research there are three short-term possibilities.
Continue reading Part II: Assistive Technology and Accessibility Research in the Developing World
