Watch a visually impaired child explain the Archimedes Principle sometime. Or Newton’s third law. It changes how you think about what’s “obvious.” Things we take for granted, like a ball falling, water displacing, a pendulum swinging, are far harder to grasp when you can’t see them happen.
I got to witness exactly that recently, as a judge at Curious Minds, an ongoing event run by Vividha Trust, an NGO that teaches STEM subjects to visually impaired children. Watching the students perform their experiments and watching their teachers, many of whom are visually impaired themselves, find ways to make abstract concepts tangible was genuinely inspiring.
Students who qualify from this first round will showcase their STEM knowledge through new experiments in Bangalore this coming November.
Vividha has been running Curious Minds for over 10 years and wanted to do something special for the participants this time - award certificates to everyone who participated, and a distinct one to those who qualified for round 2. We started discussing how to make this work for 250 students. Seemed simple enough, until we got to accessibility.
What is the point of a certificate, however fancy, if the student themselves can’t see it?
Thus began my journey to build “Taali” - an app where the certificates speak out loud with applause built-in. Like any project, I started planning how the UI/UX would work and what the certificates would look like. Once that was decided, I moved to the audio part. I searched for free options first and found most of them had a US/UK accent to try - none had an Indian one. That would not work for us.
That is when I landed on ElevenLabs - it was easy enough to use, but the Indian voice was behind a paywall. Not too steep - ₹500 per month to deliver ~250 certificates seemed reasonable! And off we went!
Taali Architecture
I'm open-sourcing this app so anyone can use it for a similar use case. It's currently tailored to this specific event and requirements, but comes with plenty of templating options to adapt it elsewhere. Feel free to clone it from GitHub and customise it as per your needs.
For reference, here is what the built print and audio certificates look and sound like (QR code disabled as this is a sample).
