Technology often promises miracles. For people like me, it is sold as a great equaliser—a guarantee that with the right device, disability need not be a barrier. We are told that access is just a download away.
But growing up, I quickly realised that this glossy narrative, wrapped in lofty assurances, was more mirage than reality—out of reach for someone like me.
For a family like mine, acquiring technology was costly. My mother worked tirelessly to buy devices she hoped would level the playing field for my visually impaired brother and me. Yet even when she succeeded, another, less visible barrier remained: almost none of this technology could speak our language. While I could listen to English books via screen readers, reading or writing in Urdu—the language of home, emotion, and identity—remained a distant dream. I longed to read novels independently, write my own stories, and revise schoolwork without relying on someone else’s eyes.
This dream felt particularly unattainable during my O-levels, when I was denied the chance to sit the Urdu exam simply because no accessible technology existed to support it.
Urdu is mandatory for university admission in Pakistan, and like many visually impaired students, I found myself shut out from a gateway to higher education—not because I lacked ability, but because the tools did not exist.
Decades later, some progress has been made, for which I am grateful. Yet the truth is that change has been slow, uneven, and unfairly distributed. My research with visually impaired communities across Pakistan shows that the very barriers I faced then persist today.
Many participants spoke of a deep disconnect with technology, especially those without proficiency in English. There is a common assumption that owning a smartphone equals access to the world. For many of us, that assumption remains painfully false.
Across Pakistan, Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi, Saraiki, and dozens of other languages are spoken daily. With nearly 80 languages in the country and almost 27 million people living with disabilities—many of whom rely on technology for education, employment, and basic communication—the inability of tools to understand local languages has consequences far beyond inconvenience. It is exclusion: systemic, silent, and widespread.
