“Express yourself,” goes the tagline of a mobile network commercial. To this, Arun Mehta, 55, a grey-bearded professor of computer engineering, adds a footnote: especially if you are disabled.

“Nobody needs to talk more than children suffering from a disability that prevents them from expressing themselves,” he says. For the past few years, Mehta, who teaches at JMIT Radaur in Haryana, has spent his spare time designing software to help people with special abilities use the computer as a communication tool.

His current project is there in his drawing room—a laptop linked to a blue plastic wheel and foot pedals that gamers would be familiar with. Turn the wheel, press the pedals or twist the gear and even a user with little motor control can navigate icons on the computer. A combination of software would enable him to type simple messages. The system is indigenous but effective and, the most important bit, it costs peanuts. “I used open source software and it is available on the net for anyone to download and use,” he says.

The system, to which Mehta hasn’t yet given a name, is currently being used at a centre for special children in Hauz Khas. The gaming touch helps make the entire exercise something of an entertainment for the students. One 17-year-old boy with a severe motor disability pushes the joystick to play a simple game of making Santa move on the screen. Soon, he begins to use the wheel and foot pedals to type words. Mehta is currently upgrading the system to enable the boy to surf and chat and thus break the communication barrier.

“My aim is to get children who are so severely disabled that they cannot type on the keyboard to use the computer. It is also important that the machine looks attractive for the child?” says Mehta.

Mehta has the conviction of a true geek that the solution to this problem lies in computers. “What would Stephen Hawking be without his computerised voice?” he asks.

Hawking’s name crops up often as Mehta articulates the need to bring special children into the mainstream. “After graduating from IIT in the 1970s, I joined a multinational. I would never have entered the area of disability if Hawking hadn’t visited India in 2001,” he says. The world’s best-known theroretical physicist and author of A Brief History of Time has suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis since his twenties and is now almost completely paralysed. “Hawkings told my friend and IIT batchmate Vickram Crishna that the software code that he uses to communicate is lost and the hardware isn’t manufactured any more. If the machine that is today Hawking’s only means of communication breaks down, it would be nothing short of a disaster. Crishna contacted me and we promised to develop a back-up software, all the time wondering why he did not turn to American companies,” recalls Mehta. He soon found out why—few computer experts were dealing with devices for the specially abled. “This whole area of disability and computers was almost empty,” he says. The software for Hawkings, which took four years to write, is available for free on the Net.

“But the right people to be designing software for the specially-abled are the specially-abled themselves. I now volunteer my services to centers, which teach information technology to specially-abled people. It is a great joy when a visually-impaired girl or boy or a youngster with any kind of disability creates a new software,” he says with quiet satisfaction.