Oswald Labs

Oswald Labs (formerly Oswald Foundation) is an Indian multinational accessibility technology company based in New Delhi and Enschede that builds 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".

Oswald Labs 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 Labs as Oswald Foundation on India's Independence Day on August 15, 2016 along with Mahendra Singh Raghuwanshi, Chowdhary's partner in previous ventures. Oswald Labs 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 EyeFocus Accelerator, a startup accelerator program for companies developing for living with visual impairment.

On April 8, 2017, Oswald Labs qualified to the finals of The Economic Times's Catapoolt Changemakers Challenge after winning the first round in Delhi. On June 17 and 18, 2017, Oswald Labs organized BharatHacks, a hackathon to solve India-specific problems, in collaboration with DigitalOcean, IBM, the Delhi-NCR chapter of Facebook Developer Circles, HackerEarth, and other technology companies. In June 2017, Oswald Labs raised ₹100,000 in a crowdfunding campaign.

In September 2017, Oswald Labs moved parts of their operation to Enschede, Netherlands and in December 2017, Oswald Foundation was renamed to Oswald Labs to focus on research and development.

Products

Agastya

Agastya is a cross-platform JavaScript library and web accessibility plug-in for websites. It automatically adds WCAG 2.0-compliancy with support for keyboard navigation, automatic generation for alternate text for images using computer vision, and font adjustment. It also includes a mode that adjusts the color temperature of the display to reduce eye strain and disruption of sleep patterns (like the program f.lux), a night mode that converts a webpage to a dark theme, and a dyslexia-friendly mode that uses Open Dyslexic and dyslexia-friendly colors. For uses with visual impairment, it has a built-in screen reader with summarization. Websites can also access analytics about their user's disabilities. It is available for free for websites with less than 10,000 pageviews per month, and has a subscription model for larger websites.

Shravan

Shravan is an operating system for smartphones and tablet computers based on the Android mobile platform. It uses vibrational and speech feedback as its primary user interface and is more accessible than regular smartphone operating systems. It can be used by people with dyslexia or visual impairment, senior citizens, and illiterates. It is also reportedly the first smartphone operating system with built-in Digital India technologies like Aadhaar integration and Unified Payments Interface payments. It works in over 25 native Indian languages. Shravan is expected to part of a publicly-available hardware device in 2018.

Valmiki

Valmiki, formerly known as Oswald, 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 design based on their reading preferences. It is a free and open-source software available in the Chrome Web Store.