Biography

Tanya Nair matched with the University of Washington in Summer 2024 as an Advancing Accessibility for Engineering Education Intern through the Spark Summer Mentorship Program. Under the guidance of Dr. Lalitha Subramanian and Prof. M. P. Anantram, she collaborated with peers to research accessibility challenges in post-secondary education, particularly for blind and low-vision students. She identified a common issue in PowerPoint accessibility—incorrect reading order—and proposed a scalable, automated solution. Since then, Tanya has been developing a Python-based pipeline to help UW faculty batch-enhance the accessibility of their presentations, using the Ally accessibility score as a key metric of enhancement.