Building the Future Leaders of Inclusion through Mentoring

Nandita began her career as an electrical engineer for 3 years before she pivoted her career into accessibility. As the first Indian-woman engineer on the manufacturing site, and as a woman with a disability, Nandita has a multi-faceted intersectional identity and has experienced exclusions. Mentoring was the key to her success with these challenges and built a strong passion for giving back. Her areas of expertise are UX, inclusive design, and engineering, and she actively mentors students & early-in career professionals to build careers within STEM, technology & accessibility.

She quit her job to follow her passion for disability advocacy and currently works at Microsoft as an Accessibility Product Manager. She was close to her grandfather, and one day, he lost his eyesight which had devastating effects on the family. This left her with the burning question, “How do I use technology to help more people?”. Her work at Microsoft directly helps people with disabilities around the whole world to access the internet through the improvements for digital accessibility! She leads a product, Accessibility Insights, that empowers developers globally to build inclusive products. Within Microsoft, she serves on the global Microsoft ASPIRE Leadership Council which shapes the experiences of thousands of new hires across Microsoft. She represents accessibility and disability inclusion on this council and continues to push for those initiatives as part of her role in her company.

She has been quoted by the Times of India, NASDAQ, SDTimes, BestColleges & interviewed by Microsoft & Lime Connect. She is an invited speaker at numerous global events including the Global Microsoft Event Ability Summit, Comcast Day of Accessibility, NBC Universal, Quantum Computing & the NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center on “How to Bake Accessibility and Inclusion into Businesses”
She is the founder of SHAKTI - a Digital Storytelling Collective which features over 50 industry accessibility leaders and professionals. Her work has been published at notable global conferences like CSUN and HCI International where she shares her knowledge on creating accessible products and processes. She is also a founder of We Disabled Dancers.