The May sun in Delhi was unrelenting. Outside the exam center, parents fanned themselves with admission slips, trading nervous glances. Inside, a teenage Nishit Bhasin stared at the final section of the Joint Entrance Examination, the fiercely competitive gateway to India’s most prestigious engineering schools, and knew it wasn’t going his way.
When the results came, they confirmed what he had felt in that sweltering room: he hadn’t made it. For many of his peers, that would have been the end of a long-cherished dream. But Nishit’s ambitions had never been limited to a single exam. “Even in school, my dream wasn’t just to get into a good college. I wanted to build something that would outlast me,” he recalls.
That dream first took shape not in a tech lab, but in the world of storytelling. Still in his early twenties, Nishit co-founded Djinns Mediaworks, a production house specializing in documentaries with historical and cultural significance. One of its most ambitious projects told the story of the India–Pakistan Partition through the eyes of those who had lived it. With funding from the Archaeological Survey of India and the Delhi Government, and with sporting legend Milkha Singh as an ambassador, the team created an immersive VR experience allowing elderly migrants to virtually revisit their childhood homes, schools, and places of worship across the border.
“It wasn’t just about history,” Nishit says. “It was about giving people something they thought they’d lost forever.”
The lesson was lasting: technology, when combined with empathy, could restore agency.
When Nishit moved to the University of Washington for his Master’s in Information Management, he brought that belief with him. On campus, he met a technologist who was blind. Listening to him describe the maze of inaccessible websites, broken screen readers, and forms that couldn’t be filled out without sighted assistance, Nishit recognized a pattern. “It was the same feeling I’d had after JEE, the door was there, but locked,” he says. “Only here, the lock was a bad design.”
That encounter sparked Incskill (A.k.a I-Stem), a company built on the principle that accessibility should not be a retrofit but a foundation. Its flagship platform, NClude, automates compliance with global standards like WCAG 2.2, ADA, Section 508, PDF/UA, and EN 301 549, embedding those checks directly into developer workflows via Jira, GitHub, Azure DevOps, and Bitbucket. By catching and fixing issues during development, enterprises avoid expensive post-launch overhauls, and users get products they can use from day one.
The numbers tell the story: over one million digital assets remediated, compliance cycles reduced by 70%, and cost savings of more than 60% for enterprise clients. But Nishit insists those figures are only part of the picture. “The real win is when a person who couldn’t do something yesterday can do it today without help.”
Global Institutions Take Notice
It didn’t take long for major players to notice. Microsoft’s AI for Accessibility program funded Incskill to build a large-scale remediation portal and an open-source OCR dataset for blind and low-vision students. That dataset is now used by education platforms and researchers worldwide to make learning materials accessible.
The GSMA Innovation Fund supported the addition of multilingual, voice-powered navigation for low-bandwidth and rural environments. In regions where literacy and connectivity are both barriers, this innovation allows users to access job portals, apply for government services, and enroll in online courses using only their voice in their native language.
An OpenAI Chat for Impact Accelerator grant enabled the launch of a WhatsApp-based accessibility assistant, bringing guidance and tools directly to basic smartphones. For users in underserved areas, the impact was immediate: no app downloads, no new devices, just an instant ability to interact with the digital world independently.
UNICEF Innovation Fund projects extended Incskill’s tools into virtual classrooms and hiring pipelines, making inclusive recruitment and training processes accessible at scale. Google’s support helped refine NClude’s real-time compliance engine so enterprises could integrate accessibility into product design rather than adding it later. Collaborations with Bosch and DE Shaw brought accessibility into industrial and financial systems, widening the scope far beyond consumer applications.
Each partnership came with clear deliverables, and each was delivered. “We don’t treat grants like cheques; we treat them like contracts,” Nishit says. “They come with an obligation to create measurable, lasting impact.”
A Moment in the Spotlight and Stevie Wonder in the Audience
In 2024, Nishit took the stage at the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference in California, the world’s largest gathering of accessibility innovators. He was there to debut VoiceNav, a GPT-4 Vision-powered browser that lets visually impaired users navigate the web conversationally, cutting task completion times in half compared to traditional screen readers.
Midway through the demo, word spread through the hall: Stevie Wonder had arrived. The music legend, long an advocate for accessibility, had stopped by to see the latest innovations firsthand. After the session, he approached Nishit’s team to learn more about VoiceNav. For Nishit, it was a surreal validation. “It wasn’t just that he came,” he says. “It was the fact that someone who has lived these challenges was curious about what we’d built. That’s when I knew we were onto something bigger than a product.”
Recognition Follows Results
In 2025, Nishit was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Social Impact, joining a list of young leaders shaping the world with bold ideas. Techstars and Stanford StartX brought Incskill into their accelerators, providing mentorship, networks, and the kind of visibility that translates into enterprise adoption. But for Nishit, the accolades are secondary. “Awards are great,” he says. “Impact is better.”
That impact is visible in sectors from banking to education to public services. Government portals in India and the United States now use NClude to maintain compliance. E-commerce sites have reported both improved user satisfaction and expanded customer bases after implementing IncSkill’s tools. Education platforms are rolling out the OCR dataset and voice navigation systems to reach students who were previously excluded.
Designing for the Future
With the European Accessibility Act set to reshape the market in 2025, Nishit sees a wave of demand coming, and he wants Incskill ready to meet it. Part of that readiness means scaling the technology; part means shaping the ecosystem. He is working to integrate accessibility modules into engineering and product management curricula so that future developers treat inclusive design as a given.
“Security, uptime, accessibility, they all belong in the same conversation,” he says. “If a product isn’t accessible, it’s broken by design.”
From Missed Doors to Building New Ones
Looking back at the day of the JEE results, Nishit doesn’t see it as a failure anymore. It was, he says, the first time he understood that one closed door doesn’t end the journey, it just changes the path. The VR Partition project taught him how to connect people to something they thought they’d lost. Incskill is teaching him how to open doors that should never have been closed in the first place.
“I missed one entrance,” he says with a smile. “I’ve spent my career building new ones.”
