When Ajit Narayanan began working on technologies for children with disabilities in India in 2008, it was the beginning of an incredible journey down a rabbit hole — one that took him and his team on a wild ride across the worlds of electrical engineering, autism, cross-cultural communication and the mathematics of language. His journey led him to build Avaz, a wheelchair-mounted tablet to help people with disabilities communicate, then even more ambitiously, to invent FreeSpeech, an entirely new visual language that could break down language barriers altogether. Ajit will talk about the series of events that led to the creation of the Avaz and FreeSpeech apps, their impact in India and around the world (earning him the National Award for Empowerment of People with Disabilities from the President of India) and his ideas on the transformative role that apps can play in education.