# What Makes a Great EdTech Company for Inclusive Schools Not every edtech company builds for every child. When a student with visual impairment sits down to learn coding, most platforms quietly exclude them—relying on colour cues, drag-and-drop visuals, and screen interactions that simply don't work without sight. The question isn't whether your school has adopted an edtech company's solution; it's whether that solution was ever designed to include all your students.

What Separates an Inclusive EdTech Company from the Rest

True inclusion in education technology is not about making fonts larger or adding a high-contrast mode. It means designing a learning experience from the ground up so that every student — regardless of ability — can engage, progress, and succeed without workarounds. Most mainstream edtech platforms are built with sighted learners as the default. Accessibility is often added later: an afterthought rather than a foundation. For students with visual impairments, this means navigating interfaces that were never meant for them — drag-and-drop editors, colour-coded feedback, and visually dense dashboards that screen readers cannot meaningfully interpret. A genuinely inclusive edtech company inverts this logic. It starts with the learner who faces the greatest barriers and designs outward from there. Next Skills 360 (NS360), an Indian K-12 EdTech company headquartered in Hyderabad, has taken precisely this approach — delivering coding, AI, future-ready skills, and inclusive skilling for students with disabilities across India since 2020.

The Reality of Coding Education for Visually Impaired Students in India

India has made significant policy commitments to inclusive education. NEP 2020 explicitly prioritises equitable learning for children with disabilities, and Samagra Shiksha's inclusion cells are mandated to ensure that all students — including those in special schools — have access to quality digital learning opportunities. Yet in practice, the gap remains wide. Coding and future-skills programmes have expanded rapidly across Indian schools, but the tools driving that expansion were almost never designed with blind or low-vision learners in mind. Special schools frequently report that they want to introduce coding but simply cannot find purpose-built, accessible tools that work for their students. State inclusion cells face a similar challenge: the mandate exists, the intent is there, but the assistive technology education infrastructure in India has not kept pace with the ambition. This is precisely the unmet need that a serious, mission-driven edtech company should be solving — and solving well.

ProGame Tactile: An Audio-First Coding App Built for Blind and Low-Vision Learners

ProGame Tactile (PGT) is Next Skills 360's direct response to this gap. It is an audio-first Android app that teaches coding to students with visual impairments — fully screen-reader friendly, with absolutely no reliance on sight at any stage of the learning journey. It is designed for Classes 5 and above. What does "audio-first" mean in practice? Every navigation cue, every piece of learning feedback, every instruction, and every milestone is delivered through sound and screen-reader compatibility. Students do not need to see the interface to understand it, interact with it, or learn from it. The experience is built for the ear, not the eye. Because PGT runs on Android, it is accessible on the kinds of devices that schools, families, and inclusion programmes across India already commonly use — eliminating the need for expensive or specialist hardware. Coding for visually impaired students no longer requires a specialist lab. It requires a phone or tablet and the right application.

How Special Schools and Inclusion Cells Can Deploy ProGame Tactile

For special schools and state inclusion cells exploring ProGame Tactile, the path to deployment is designed to be practical rather than disruptive. PGT integrates into existing timetables as a structured coding programme for Classes 5 and above, delivered on Android devices that schools may already have or can procure affordably. NS360's track record provides meaningful assurance to institutional partners. The company has been deployed across 1,200+ schools in India across 12+ states, has impacted 240,000+ students since 2020, trained 10,000+ educators, and has directly impacted 500+ students with disabilities through inclusive skilling programmes. These are not pilot-scale numbers — they reflect genuine operational capacity. NS360 has also earned 12 international and national recognitions, including the MIT Solver award, the AI for Humanity Prize from the McGovern Foundation, and the ElevatED Award from Dell Technologies India and MeitY. For CSR teams and government inclusion cells making investment decisions, this credibility matters.

What to Ask Before Choosing an EdTech Company for Your Inclusion Programme

Before committing to any edtech company for your inclusion programme, apply a practical checklist. The right questions protect your students and your investment: - Does the solution work entirely without a visual screen interface? If not, it is not truly built for blind learners. - Is it fully compatible with screen readers such as TalkBack on Android? - Has it been tested with and designed for students with visual impairments — not simply adapted from a sighted-learner product? - Does it align with NEP 2020 and CBSE framework goals for foundational coding and digital literacy? - Is teacher training and onboarding support included? Inclusion programmes often have lean teams. - Can it scale across multiple schools or districts without prohibitive procurement complexity? ProGame Tactile meets each of these criteria. It was not retrofitted for accessibility — it was built accessible from day one, making it a meaningful choice for schools and CSR initiatives that take inclusion seriously.

Building a Future Where Every Student Can Code

The true measure of an edtech company is not the number of students it reaches — it is the range of students it genuinely serves. A platform used by hundreds of thousands of learners but inaccessible to students with visual impairments is, by definition, an incomplete solution. India has a generation of students with visual impairments who are intellectually ready to code, analytically capable of mastering programming logic, and deeply motivated to build future-ready careers. What they need is not charity — they need tools designed with the same rigour and ambition that mainstream learners take for granted. When assistive technology education and thoughtful curriculum design come together, the results are transformative. NS360's work — from Hyderabad's inclusion classrooms to special schools across 12 Indian states — demonstrates that this is not aspirational. It is already happening. The question is how many more students we can bring into that future, and how quickly.

Is your school or inclusion programme looking for a coding solution built specifically for students with visual impairments? Explore ProGame Tactile by Next Skills 360 — an audio-first Android app designed for Classes 5 and above. Visit nextskills360.in or reach out to our team to request a demo for your school or CSR initiative.

Is your school or inclusion programme looking for a coding solution built specifically for students with visual impairments? Explore ProGame Tactile by Next Skills 360 — an audio-first Android app designed for Classes 5 and above. Visit nextskills360.in or reach out to our team to request a demo for your school or CSR initiative.