One on one with Cary Supalo

Cary Supalo is a research developer working at Educational Testing Service (ETS), the assessment organization that administers exams including the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE). He specializes in making exams fair and inclusive to people with disabilities.Supalo, who is blind, received his PhD in chemistry and focused on developing tools to make science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education more accessible. Outside of that work, he founded the company Independence Science to promote equity and inclusion in STEM for the blind and low-vision community. Soren Lipman spoke with Supalo about the accessibility problems he’s noticed in education and in the lab and how he’s trying to solve them. This interview was edited for length and clarity.Tell me about the sorts of tools you have developed in your work with Independence Science. Which tools are you most proud of? I started Independence Science back in 2009. We initially sold a text-to-speech plug-in as a product. We pursued additional NSF [US National Science Foundation] funding to do more talking-laboratory-tool development over the next 15 years. We used the funding to write a text-to-speech screen reader for a handheld data logger, allowing blind students not only to collect quantifiable laboratory data in the science laboratory classroom but also to collect data out in the field. I’ve taken great pride in knowing that it makes quantifiable data collection possible for the blind, not only in chemistry but in pretty much any branch of science. But I tell people, it doesn’t make every facet of the