How blind people at IIT Madras learn to take photos

IIT Madras's Accessibility Research Centre runs workshops where blind people compose photographs using sound, touch and the science of light. Dr Hemachandran Karah explains the art of listening, and why music and mathematics matter to every scientist.

In Short

• Blind photographers compose pictures using sound, touch and light physics
• Several shots follow, then AI or a colleague reviews them
• Dr Hemachandran Karah says blind photography is mindful, deliberate seeing

A hall, two people talking, a microphone switched on and the hum of an air conditioner. To most of us, that is background noise. To Dr Hemachandran Karah of IIT Madras, it is where a photograph begins.

He was describing how a blind person would photograph the very room we were sitting in. First, they would listen to it, the way one reads a page before writing on it. Who is sitting where? From which side is someone walking in? Only when the room has taken shape in the mind does the lens move. At the Accessibility Research Centre at IIT Madras, where Dr Karah leads blind photography workshops, this is the craft being taught.

Blind photography sounds, at first, like an oxymoron, two words that seem to cancel each other out. "But the devil is in the detail," Dr Karah tells India Today Digital. Look closer, and what appears is "a very fine craft which can actually teach photography some valuable lessons like mindfulness."

Dr Karah, who moves through the world by sound and touch, is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is a founding member of the centre, which was inaugurated on October 6, 2025 by former Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, and which studies how education can be made accessible to people with disabilities.

HEARING THE ROOM BEFORE FRAMING IT

For these photographers, a scene is first built from sound.

"For example, I rely on hearing capacity a lot," Dr Karah tells India Today Digital, and on touch. Blind photography adds one more companion to those senses, a camera.

The frame is gathered from clues: a voice to one side, the place where someone sits, the direction from which a person enters. "It's not as though I click the picture and run away," he says. "I have to know what I am clicking and to what consequence."

THE SCIENCE OF LIGHT, LEARNED WITHOUT SEEING IT

Light is the raw material of every photograph, and it can be understood without being seen.

A photographer, he says, must know the principles of light propagation. In simple terms, it is the story of how light leaves a source, bounces off the things around it and reaches the lens. A camera gathers that light and records it, so how much enters, and where it is brought into focus, decides whether a picture turns out sharp, dark or washed out.

One frame is seldom enough. The photographer makes three or four pictures so that one of them comes out well. Then a second pair of eyes, either an AI tool or a colleague, examines the result. This, he says, is mindful photography: involving your mind before you click.

"Picture is a beautiful medium," he says. "It has to be clicked, shared and enjoyed together, for personal therapy, friendship and profession."

All of this rests on one skill, and it is not sight. It is listening. And when our conversation moved from the camera to music, Dr Karah's answers kept returning to the same place: the ear.

WHY MUSIC MOVES US

The same listening that builds a photograph also explains why a song can undo us.

Music is the subject that puzzles and interests him most. "You can disappear into that special universe together or privately," Dr Karah says. "Music is capable of that."

There is science behind it, he says. Music therapy, the use of music to support emotional and physical health, "is now an established discipline."

Our bodies are a web of hormones and emotions that interact by the laws of chemistry, biophysics and aesthetics. The influence begins before birth: a mother's heartbeat and movements are "our first music."

Frequency (how high or low a note is), rhythm (the pattern of beats) and resonance (when one vibrating thing sets another vibrating) can tell science which note provokes which feeling. Put on an upbeat rhythm, he adds, and even out of politeness we start wagging our shoulders.

Language, he says, can only go so far. Speak of an AR Rahman song, and "our faces can blossom because we feel the music inside." What language cannot do, "music completes the cycle."

THE MATHEMATICS HIDDEN IN A RAGA

Long before equations described music, craftspeople and listeners already understood it by ear.

A raga, the melodic framework of Indian classical music, is "mathematically and aesthetically and even rationally designed," Dr Karah says, "but intuitively felt and enjoyed." That does not make it better than Western music, folk, tribal music or jazz, he stresses. Every tradition has a deep structure, and "a fantastic power to hold people like motherhood." It can be a refuge, he says, when you are sad and need solace, in the voice of S Janaki, SP Balasubrahmanyam or Michael Jackson.

Artists and rasikas, discerning listeners, who have no clue about the physics of sound, "know intuitively what mathematicians can know through equations." Intuition, he says, comes first and mathematics later. "There is no hierarchy. It is the way things work." Artisans, such as tabla makers, know the mathematics of their instruments "indirectly without naming it that way."

That is why he believes in translation. Explaining Einstein's theory of relativity to an engineer takes little effort, he says, but explaining it to a grandmother or a first-standard child "requires craft, requires a good story." Mathematics is only one way of telling it, and "there must not be hierarchy between these stories."

Scientists, engineers and humanists, he says, all need music, and need to learn from ordinary craftspeople and folk musicians too. "If we develop that listening capacity, then we are good to go," he says. "Many insights will come our way."

A PROFESSION, NOT A DEFAULT

Inclusion means a real choice of careers, not one chosen on a person's behalf.

Blind people, Dr Karah says, can truly be included in many walks of life, irrespective of their level of sight, from "cutting-edge professions like journalism, lab work, aesthetics and painting" with AI and co-creators, such as a friend, working alongside them. In October 2025, the department helped host a four-day symposium on blind artists and accessibility in art.

Children who cannot see, he says, are drawn to what they can do with their hands, voice and hearing, and many come to know the beauty of nature through sounds and music. That is a gift, but he is wary of the assumption that music is their natural calling.

Since the 18th century, he says, it has been a common profession for blind people, but it is "often enforced rather than natural." A visually impaired child, like any other child, may love music and wish to make it a profession. "Why not?" he asks. But it should be her choice, not a path laid down for her.

ASKING BEFORE BUILDING

The centre's approach rests on one rule: begin with the people the technology is for.

The centre wants accessibility to be an organising principle of education rather than an add-on, with a focus on AI, extended reality, which blends digital images with the real world, and teacher training.

Dr Karah says the mistake is not only an engineer's. "Even humanities people can skip humans," he says. "When we create something for disabled people, it is better to know from them whether they actually want it. So co-creation should not be a statement to get funding." Ideation, the stage where ideas first take shape, "should begin with disabled people so that we actually know the pulse."

Asked what he wishes scientists and engineers would carry into their work, he answers: the art of listening, and "listening genuinely." Working with people, he adds, is something anybody can do. Co-creation should not be a buzzword for winning CSR money, the funds companies set aside for social causes. "This is not my expectation for engineers alone. It's for all of us."

"I don't like engineers, scientists or humanists to imagine what people want," he tells India Today Digital.

For a blind photographer, listening is where every frame begins. For the rest of us, it may be where understanding does.

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