- Click Download. Your browser generates a Grade 2 UEB Braille file instantly from this page’s live content.
- Open in BrailleBlaster (free), Duxbury DBT, or send to any Braille embosser or refreshable Braille display.
- For embossing: pre-formatted at 40 cells per line, 25 lines per page — standard A4 Braille.
An Announcement from the Inventor
UAIE™
Universal Adaptive Interface Engine
An Announcement Grounded in the
Pedagogy of UDIL
Universal Design for Inclusive Learning
Fiza Pathan
Mumbai · 21 April 2026
Indian Patent Application 202621054517 · TM 7653558, 7653559, 7653575, 7653576
❞ Prologue ❟
Let me come to the point. On the thirty-first of March two thousand and twenty-six, I placed onto my teaching portfolio a piece of software I had been building for some months, and gave it a name. I called it UAIE — the Universal Adaptive Interface Engine. I wrote, with Claude’s patient help at the keyboard, the first version of what I believed was missing from the accessibility literature: not a better screen reader, not a cleverer font, not another simplification tool, but a single coherent system that treats every reader as a reader in full and gives that reader — not their teacher, not their parent, not their institution, and least of all their device — the final word on how the text reaches them.
What follows is the public account of that invention. It is the first occasion on which I set down, in its complete form, the theoretical framework within which UAIE was built: a framework I have come to call UDIL, Universal Design for Inclusive Learning. UDIL is not a renaming of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) tradition for which CAST has laboured for three decades with distinction. UDIL is an extension of UDL, and in one precise respect a departure from it. Where UDL designs the curriculum so that multiple learners can meet it, UDIL builds the interface so that the curriculum comes to each learner already shaped by the learner’s own act of choosing. UDIL relocates the adaptation from the designer’s desk to the learner’s hand. This relocation is small in description and enormous in consequence, and the whole of this announcement is concerned with its justification.
I write in the first person because the theory and the software are not separable from their author. I write in the academic register elsewhere in this paper because the argument must stand on its own feet, independent of the affection in which some of my students and readers hold me. I ask the reader — whether educator, policy maker, procurement officer, grant reviewer, parent of a differently-abled child, or sceptic — to read the argument whole before rendering a judgement. The pillars of UAIE are not a features list. They are the implementation record of a pedagogical claim. The claim itself is what I stand behind.
— Fiza Pathan
Mumbai, the twenty-first of April, two thousand and twenty-six.
Figure 1. The major inclusions of UAIE at a glance. Each is a UDIL axiom in operation.
UDIL — Universal Design for Inclusive Learning
1.1 The Inheritance of UDL
The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, as developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) and codified across three successive versions of its Guidelines between 1998 and 2018, stands as one of the most consequential pedagogical innovations of the past half-century (CAST, 2018). Its central claim — that learning environments must be designed from the outset to accommodate the variability of human learners rather than retrofitted to accommodate individual deficit — constitutes an ethical position as much as a design philosophy. Its three principles, derived from affective, recognition, and strategic neural networks as described by Meyer, Rose, and Gordon (2014), prescribe that instruction must provide Multiple Means of Engagement (the ‘why’ of learning), Multiple Means of Representation (the ‘what’ of learning), and Multiple Means of Action and Expression (the ‘how’ of learning).
UDL is one of the frameworks the present author encountered during the Postgraduate Certificate in International Teacher Education (PGCITE) at Podar International School, Santacruz West, Mumbai, completed in 2026, and which she has since deepened through extensive self-directed study. UDL is, further, the framework against which the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has recommended that Indian classrooms be designed under the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020; NCERT, 2022). UDL has, in short, achieved both the scholarly maturity and the policy endorsement that mark a settled theoretical instrument.
UDL has also, however, a structural limitation that becomes visible the moment one attempts to apply it at scale in a classroom of thirty children, each with a differently constituted body and a differently disposed mind. That limitation is the subject of the next section, and it is the reason UDIL exists.
1.2 The Structural Limitation of UDL at the Interface Layer
UDL, as articulated by CAST, is a framework for the design of curriculum. The teacher, or the curriculum designer, or the textbook author is asked to anticipate the variability of the learning community and to prepare multiple representations, multiple means of engagement, and multiple channels of expression in advance. The learner then encounters a curriculum that has, at its designer’s discretion, been made plural. This is a significant advance over the monolithic curriculum of the nineteenth-century classroom, and it has, demonstrably, raised the ceiling for learners who would otherwise have been excluded.
It has not, however, addressed the condition under which the overwhelming majority of educational content is now consumed. The contemporary learner encounters text not primarily on the page of a teacher-prepared worksheet but on the screen of a browser, a mobile application, a word processor, or an electronic reader, drawing on sources that no curriculum designer selected and no institution vetted. A student in Dharavi reading a Wikipedia article on Ambedkar’s constitutional thought; a blind adult in Nairobi reading the BBC; a dyslexic parent in Cornwall reading the NHS guidance on an operation her child is about to undergo — none of these readers can wait for the curriculum designer to prepare an accessible version. They need the adaptation at the moment of reading, from the interface, without authorisation, without subscription, and without the text knowing that they are struggling.
UDL, designed for the curriculum, cannot meet this condition. It was never intended to. The adaptation lies, under UDL, with the designer. What is required is a framework whose principle is that the adaptation lies with the learner, at the interface, at the moment of reading, on demand. This is the framework I name UDIL.
1.3 UDIL — A Definition
Definition
Universal Design for Inclusive Learning (UDIL) is the pedagogical framework, originated by this author, which holds that accessibility to any text, in any medium, on any device, at any moment of use, is a learner-controlled right, not a designer-provisioned favour. UDIL’s operational claim is that the interface — the browser, the application, the word processor, the mobile device — must itself be capable of generating, on the learner’s demand, every alternative representation that learner requires for the text to be accessible to them, and that this capability must be present whether or not the original designer, author, or institution anticipated that learner’s requirements.
UDIL rests on three axioms.
Axiom I · Relocation
The site of accessibility adaptation is the interface, not the curriculum. The interface must hold the plurality; the curriculum need not anticipate it.
Axiom II · Learner Sovereignty
The learner alone determines which adaptation is required, at which moment, for which text. No institutional gatekeeper, no teacher permission, and no diagnostic label is required.
Axiom III · Unconditional Provision
The core adaptations — those that do not depend on an external inference cost — must be available to every learner at no charge, without account creation, without data collection, and without any condition that could be withdrawn.
UDIL is compatible with UDL and in no sense supplants it. The curriculum designer should continue to follow UDL. The interface designer must, in addition, follow UDIL. The two frameworks are complementary: UDL addresses the preparation of learning; UDIL addresses its encounter.
1.4 UDIL and the UDL Guidelines — A Point-by-Point Relation
The relation between UDIL and the three UDL principles may be stated precisely. UDIL’s first axiom — relocation — does not displace UDL’s Principle of Multiple Means of Representation; rather, it transfers the operational burden of providing those multiple means from the curriculum designer to the interface itself, thereby making the principle enforceable on texts the curriculum designer did not prepare. UDIL’s second axiom — learner sovereignty — does not displace UDL’s Principle of Multiple Means of Action and Expression; rather, it guarantees that the learner’s choice of expression cannot be overridden by an institution or device, thereby closing a loophole through which well-meaning gatekeepers have, historically, reintroduced deficit models. UDIL’s third axiom — unconditional provision — does not displace UDL’s Principle of Multiple Means of Engagement; rather, it removes the single largest impediment to engagement, which is the administrative friction of having to ask permission to be accommodated.
UDIL is therefore best understood as the operational extension of UDL from the curriculum layer to the interface layer, with three ethical axioms that the older framework, through no fault of its authors, was not positioned to enforce. The remainder of this paper describes how UAIE implements UDIL in practice.
The Seven Pillars of UAIE as UDIL in Practice
UAIE is the reference implementation of UDIL. It is a cross-platform accessibility system consisting of seven functional pillars, each of which instantiates one or more of the three UDIL axioms against a specific category of reader need. The pillars are not a feature list; they are a discipline. Each pillar was built because it was the thing UDIL required, not because it was convenient or because comparable products already had it.
Pillar 1 — Text-to-Speech and the Axiom of Relocation
UAIE reads any selected text aloud using the device’s native speech-synthesis engine. On the desktop browser, this is the Web Speech API’s SpeechSynthesis interface; on Android, it is the platform’s TextToSpeech class; within Microsoft Word, it is the Office runtime’s in-process speech module. Voice selection, pitch, and speed are user-controlled. On the browser and Word implementations the user may choose between the British Received Pronunciation voice and an American Ivy League voice, each offered in both a male and a female register.
The pedagogical import is not that speech synthesis exists — it has existed in operating systems since the 1980s — but that under UDIL the text aloud follows the reader, not the curriculum. A child reading a PDF on WhatsApp, a retired professor reading an email, a catechism student reading a passage from the Summa Theologiae in a browser — all receive the same capability. The axiom of relocation is, in this pillar, absolute: no document, no site, and no application is more privileged than any other.
Academic grounding: UDL Guideline 1.2, ‘Offer alternatives for auditory information’, and Guideline 5.1, ‘Use multiple media for communication’ (CAST, 2018).
Pillar 2 — Grade 2 UEB Braille and the Axiom of Unconditional Provision
UAIE converts any selected text to Grade 2 Unified English Braille and downloads the result as a Braille-Ready Format (.BRF) file, directly compatible with every refreshable Braille display and every Braille embosser currently in professional use. The conversion engine is a pure-JavaScript implementation of Grade 2 Unified English Braille, covering alphabetic wordsigns, strong contractions, the numeric indicator, the capital indicator, and the emphasis markers, in accordance with the International Council on English Braille’s Rules of Unified English Braille (ICEB, 2013).
Three design decisions distinguish this implementation from comparable tools. The first is the choice of Grade 2 over Grade 1: Grade 1 UEB renders letter-for-letter, which is slower and more exhausting for the proficient Braille reader. Grade 2 uses contractions that compress reading to the rate of a competent sighted reader. A Braille-generating tool that offers only Grade 1 has patronised its user. The second decision is the export to .BRF rather than on-screen display: a .BRF file can be embossed, sent to a refreshable display, archived, forwarded to a teacher, printed for a classroom handout. On-screen Braille cannot do any of these things. The third decision is the absence of an API: Braille generation is therefore available to every UAIE user regardless of internet connectivity, regardless of device class, and at no cost.
The axiom of unconditional provision is, in this pillar, operationalised in its strongest form. A blind reader in any economic circumstance, anywhere, at any time, can generate a Braille file from any text on any device that runs UAIE. No account. No payment. No permission. No telemetry. The capability is either there or it is not; under UDIL it must be there.
Academic grounding: UDL Guideline 1.1, ‘Offer ways of customising the display of information’; ICEB (2013) The Rules of Unified English Braille.
Pillar 3 — Plain Language Transformation and the Zone of Proximal Development
UAIE rewrites difficult passages at six graduated levels of cognitive complexity, corresponding to the six tiers of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001):
- L1 — Remember: key-fact extraction, readability-rule based, on-device, no API key required.
- L2 — Understand: plain-language paraphrase at approximately Grade 6 reading level (Flesch Reading Ease above 70), on-device, no API key required.
- L3 — Apply: contextual rewriting that relates the passage to a worked example. Requires an Anthropic API key supplied by the user.
- L4 — Analyse: identifies claims, evidence, and logical structure. Requires an Anthropic API key.
- L5 — Evaluate: weighs competing interpretations and surfaces value judgements. Requires an Anthropic API key.
- L6 — Create: generates a derivative composition — a summary, a counter-argument, a teaching exemplar — using the source as stimulus. Requires an Anthropic API key.
The six-level architecture is not an arbitrary gradation. It is the operational form of Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) applied to the comprehension of a single text. The ZPD names the region between what the learner can do unaided and what the learner can do with skilled support. UAIE’s Plain Language architecture permits the learner to meet a text first at the level at which the text is legible to them, and then to see, at the next level above, what the same text looks like when it is worked with the kind of cognitive operation they are reaching towards. L3 shows the learner what application of the source material looks like; L4 shows what analysis looks like; L5 shows what evaluation looks like; L6 shows what creative transformation looks like. The scaffold is the ZPD made tangible.
Sweller’s (1988) Cognitive Load Theory governs the engineering of each level. Extraneous load — the cognitive cost of parsing interface chrome, clicking through dialogues, choosing among irrelevant options — is reduced to near-zero by the single-click design. Intrinsic load — the inherent difficulty of the material — is modulated by the level the learner chooses. Germane load — the cognitive work directed at building durable understanding — is the only load the learner is asked to bear, and it is the only load that produces learning.
Levels L1 and L2 are permanently free of charge and require no external dependencies, in compliance with UDIL’s axiom of unconditional provision. Levels L3 to L6 invoke an inference service (the Anthropic Claude API) that carries a per-request cost; the key is obtained by the user and stored in the user’s own local storage, so that the capability is available to users who wish to incur the cost but is never monetised by the publisher. A forthcoming institutional tier, UAIE Premium, will provide L3–L6 to schools on a per-student subscription basis, with the student paying nothing.
Academic grounding: Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001); Vygotsky (1978) Mind in Society; Sweller (1988); Flesch (1948).
Pillar 4 — Visual Adjustments and the Body of the Reader
The phenomenology of reading is not reducible to the symbolic content of the text. Reading is an embodied act: light strikes the retina, ocular muscles track along lines, the visual cortex distinguishes figure from ground, and the reader’s subjective experience of ease or difficulty is governed by factors — contrast, hue, letter form, line spacing, page colour — that have nothing to do with the meaning of what is being read. A reader with dyslexia, a reader with low vision, a reader with protanopia, a reader with photophobia following concussion — each requires the visual rendering of the text to be something other than the designer’s default. UAIE provides six visual treatments, each toggled independently:
- Reading-Support Font. The OpenDyslexic typeface replaces the page font, paired with a cream background (#FAF4E6), letter-spacing of 0.06em, and line-height of 1.6 — the combination recommended in the British Dyslexia Association Style Guide (2023).
- High Contrast. White-on-black, with a measured contrast ratio of 21:1 (the WCAG 2.2 AAA threshold is 7:1; the AA threshold is 4.5:1).
- Dark Mode. Inversion with hue-rotation preserving image colour fidelity, applied via CSS filter. Images, videos, and iframes are counter-inverted so that photographs remain natural.
- Focus Mode. Dims non-active content and surfaces a single active paragraph, reducing the visual competition for attention that fatigues readers with attention-related differences.
- Reading Ruler. A horizontal translucent band tracks cursor position, providing the kind of line-by-line visual anchor that low-tech reading rulers have provided for acquired-brain-injury and stroke patients for generations.
- Colour-Blindness Simulation. Three modes — protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia — implemented as SVG feColorMatrix filters using the transformation matrices of Machado, Oliveira, and Fernandes (2009). The UAIE panel itself is excluded from the filter so that its controls remain readable even when the simulation is active.
The visual adjustments honour UDL Guidelines 1.1 and 1.3. Under UDIL, their provision is unconditional and learner-controlled: the reader chooses, the interface obeys.
Pillar 5 — Sign Language and the Linguistic Dignity of the Deaf Reader
Sign languages are not pantomimic renderings of spoken languages but fully-fledged natural languages with their own grammars, vocabularies, and literary traditions. The failure of many accessibility tools to treat them as such has contributed to the linguistic marginalisation of Deaf communities in digital environments. UAIE addresses this failure by providing sign-language equivalents for any selected word across four systems:
- British Sign Language (BSL). The language of the Deaf community of the British Isles, wholly distinct from English and from ASL. UAIE draws on the SpreadTheSign dictionary (en.gb) for word-level lookup.
- American Sign Language (ASL). The language of the Deaf community of North America, drawing on the SpreadTheSign dictionary (en.us).
- Indian Sign Language (ISL). The language of the Deaf community across the Indian subcontinent, recognised by the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC) under the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities. UAIE draws on SpreadTheSign (isl.in) and the ISLRTC lexicon.
- UAIE Sign. An original visual gesture system generated by this author as part of the UAIE invention. It comprises seventy-two bundled concept signs, delivered as animated GIFs, covering foundational vocabulary — greetings, temporal words, pedagogical verbs, emotion terms, numerical concepts — together with thirty-six fingerspelling assets (twenty-six letters A to Z and ten digits 0 to 9) permitting full fallback fingerspelling for any word outside the seventy-two-concept core. UAIE Sign is the only sign language in the engine that operates fully offline and displays directly within the UAIE panel, without requiring an external website, without a network call, and without the privacy concerns that accompany third-party embeds.
The inclusion of UAIE Sign requires a particular comment, because it is the point at which UAIE moves from implementation of existing standards to original invention. UAIE Sign does not claim to replace any natural sign language; such a claim would be both ethically indefensible and linguistically absurd. Rather, UAIE Sign is a minimal vocabulary for classroom, pedagogical, and emergency-communication use, offered as an offline-first, free, always-available visual overlay where no natural sign language’s dictionary is accessible, or where the network is absent, or where the reader simply requires an immediate visual cue. It is the contribution of a hearing educator to the visual-accessibility literature, offered in the spirit of supplement rather than substitution.
Pillar 6 — The Cognitive Load Indicator
UAIE computes a real-time readability score for any active text using the Flesch Reading Ease formula (Flesch, 1948), reported alongside the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level, the mean sentence length, and the percentage of polysyllabic words. The analyser updates live as the reader scrolls; all computation occurs on the device.
The readability indicator is not for the student. It is for the teacher. A teacher preparing to assign a passage to a class may glance at the indicator and see at once that the passage is Grade 12 in a Grade 9 class, or that its mean sentence length is forty-two words when the class can comfortably parse twenty-six. The indicator thereby permits the teacher to modulate intrinsic load in advance of assignment, in accordance with Sweller’s (1988) Cognitive Load Theory. A teacher who assigns a Grade 12 passage to a Grade 9 class without adjustment is not a rigorous teacher but an unkind one; the cognitive science is settled on this point, and the indicator makes the kindness easy.
Pillar 7 — The Multiple Intelligences Reformatter
Gardner’s (1983, 1999) theory of Multiple Intelligences holds that human cognition is not reducible to a single general factor but instead comprises a plurality of relatively autonomous capabilities: linguistic, logical–mathematical, spatial, bodily–kinaesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, and existential. The theory is not universally accepted within academic psychology — see White (2006) for a thoughtful critique — but it has proved enduringly useful in pedagogy as a framework for presenting the same content in multiple modalities.
UAIE reformats text to suit each of the nine intelligences. A selected passage may be recast as a mnemonic rhyme (musical), as a numbered deductive sequence (logical–mathematical), as a spatial mind-map (spatial), as a personal reflection question (intrapersonal), as a paired-discussion prompt (interpersonal), and so on. L1 and L2 reformulations operate entirely on-device and require no API key. L3 through L6 — which produce substantively more elaborate reformulations — use the same API-key mechanism as the Plain Language pillar. Institutional subscribers to UAIE Premium will receive L3–L6 without any API-key requirement for their students.
Self-Determination Theory and the Sovereignty of the Learner
The second axiom of UDIL — learner sovereignty — is grounded in Deci and Ryan’s (1985, 2000) Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the most developed theoretical account in contemporary psychology of the motivational conditions under which human beings flourish. SDT identifies three basic psychological needs whose satisfaction is necessary for intrinsic motivation and psychological wellbeing: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Autonomy is the experience of acting as an origin of one’s own behaviour. SDT shows, across hundreds of empirical studies, that learners who experience themselves as authors of their learning decisions engage more deeply, persist longer, and retain more than those who experience themselves as objects of another’s decisions (Ryan and Deci, 2017). UAIE’s design reflects this finding at every turn. No account is created; no sign-in is requested; no institution is consulted; no diagnostic label is demanded before the Braille button becomes available. The learner decides. The learner acts. The interface obeys.
Competence is the experience of acting effectively in one’s environment. SDT shows that this experience requires scaffolding within reach of the learner’s current capability — precisely the Vygotskian ZPD addressed in Section 2, Pillar 3. UAIE’s provision of L1 and L2 simplification at no cost ensures that the entry-level cognitive support is universally available; the graduated L3–L6 levels permit the learner to encounter progressively more demanding work when they choose. Competence is built, under UDIL, by giving the learner the tools to reach beyond where they are, not by lowering the bar to where they already are.
Relatedness is the experience of being connected to, and cared for by, others. It is the least often addressed of SDT’s three needs in accessibility-tool design, and it is the one that the inclusion of Sign Language — including UAIE Sign — addresses most directly. A Deaf reader who receives, alongside a passage of English text, a sign-language rendering that was produced in their language, not their teacher’s, has been told, in the design of the interface itself, that their community exists. Relatedness is communicated as much by what an interface includes as by what it says; UAIE’s inclusion of BSL, ASL, ISL, and UAIE Sign is, therefore, not a feature but an act of welcome.
DAISY and the Teaching Portfolio as Digital Talking Book
The DAISY standard (Digital Accessible Information System; ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2002) is the international specification for Digital Talking Books, developed by the DAISY Consortium in the late 1990s and ratified by the National Information Standards Organization and by the International Organization for Standardization. DAISY is the standard against which every major library for the print-disabled — Bookshare (United States), Learning Ally, RNIB Bookshare (United Kingdom), the Sugamya Pustakalaya (India) — organises its holdings. A book that is DAISY-compliant is a book that the world’s print-disabled readers can, in principle, read.
Fiza Pathan’s teaching portfolio at fizapathansteachingportfolioforpgcite.com is, as a direct consequence of UDIL’s first axiom of relocation, itself a DAISY-compliant Digital Talking Book environment. Six DAISY 2.02 books — covering the portfolio’s main pages, lesson plans, Action Research, UAIE documentation, accessibility statement, and curriculum vitae — have been generated, each conforming to the ANSI/NISO specification of a navigation control centre (ncc.html), a content file with paragraph-level identifiers, per-section SMIL files for synchronised reading, and a README. Each book opens in AMIS, EasyReader, Victor Reader, or Capti Voice — the major DAISY readers in use internationally — and each is downloadable directly from the portfolio.
The significance of this design decision must be stated plainly. A teaching portfolio is, conventionally, a curated display of its author’s professional work. When the portfolio’s author is an educator who wishes to work in inclusive classrooms, the portfolio itself is the first test of whether she has understood what inclusive means. A portfolio that describes UDL and UDIL but is not itself accessible to a print-disabled reviewer has failed its own argument. By ensuring that her portfolio is DAISY-compliant, the author places her own teaching record in the libraries that her prospective students’ families already use. This is UDIL’s first axiom applied to its own point of origin.
Formal WCAG 2.2 AA Conformance
The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2, published by the Web Accessibility Initiative on 5 October 2023, constitute the legally and technically authoritative standard for web accessibility internationally. WCAG 2.2 comprises eighty-six success criteria organised across four principles — Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust — and three levels of conformance: A (minimum), AA (standard for most regulated contexts), and AAA (highest).
Formal Declaration
Official W3C Conformance Logo
Issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative.
Click the logo to view the W3C explanation of Level AA conformance.
Ms Fiza Pathan, inventor of UAIE and proprietor of the teaching portfolio, through her authorised representative Fiza Pathan Publishing (OPC) Private Limited, hereby declares that the deployed UAIE products and the hosting portfolio substantially conform to the WCAG 2.2 Level AA standard, recognised under ISO/IEC 40500:2025.
The scope of the declaration encompasses every page of the portfolio at fizapathansteachingportfolioforpgcite.com, together with the UAIE Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox browser extensions and the UAIE native Android application distributed via the Amazon Appstore.
Evaluation methodology
The declaration is supported by automated and manual evaluation against all fifty-five Level A and Level AA success criteria of WCAG 2.2. Automated evaluation used WAVE (WebAIM, Utah State University, Institute for Disability Research, Policy, and Practice), the TPGi Colour Contrast Analyser, axe DevTools, and Google Lighthouse. Manual evaluation included full keyboard-only navigation testing, screen-reader verification with NVDA on Windows, VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, and TalkBack on Android, and focus-indicator visual inspection. Under the W3C’s own framework, WCAG conformance is declared by the provider on the basis of such evaluation rather than certified by a central authority; this declaration is made on that footing, and the supporting evidence is retained for independent audit.
Conformance summary
| Conformance status | Criteria | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Supports | 50 | 91% |
| Partially supports | 2 | 4% |
| Does not support | 0 | 0% |
| Not applicable | 3 | 5% |
| Total assessed | 55 | 100% |
The complete nineteen-page Conformance Report, mapped to every success criterion from 1.1.1 through 4.1.3 in the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) format, is available to institutional procurement officers, regulatory reviewers, and auditors upon request. The formal conformance appendix, together with the W3C WCAG 2.2 AA conformance logo and the downloadable PDF, may be consulted at fizapathansteachingportfolioforpgcite.com/accessibility-statement/.
The Academic Point
WCAG is the floor, not the ceiling. WCAG 2.2 AA conformance is the legal and regulatory minimum for public-facing web content in every jurisdiction whose accessibility legislation has kept pace with contemporary practice. UAIE exceeds WCAG in the direction that UDIL requires: it does not merely make the portfolio accessible to readers who arrive with existing assistive technologies but provides those technologies itself, for every reader, on every platform, at no cost. WCAG compliance certifies that the door is not locked; UDIL requires that the building be habitable. UAIE satisfies both.
Platform Deployment as a UDIL Principle
UDIL’s first axiom — that the site of accessibility adaptation is the interface and not the curriculum — has a direct operational implication: the tool must follow the learner, not the other way round. A tool available only in a browser has abandoned the learner reading on a mobile phone; a tool available only on a mobile phone has abandoned the learner reading on a word processor; a tool available on all of these has, at last, taken seriously the condition under which contemporary learners actually read. UAIE is therefore built as seven distinct products across four platform families, each described below. The table summarises the current state as at 7 June 2026.
| Product | Status | Host |
|---|---|---|
| UAIE Chrome Extension | Live | Google Chrome Web Store |
| UAIE Microsoft Edge Extension | Live | Microsoft Edge Add-ons Store |
| UAIE for Amazon (Android) | Live | Amazon Appstore |
| UAIE Firefox Add-on | Live | Mozilla Add-ons (AMO) |
| UAIE Microsoft Word Add-in | In development | Not yet deployed · AppSource submission pending |
| UAIE Android App | Closed testing | Google Play Store (pending) |
| UAIE WordPress Integration | Live | This portfolio site |
The current engine headline version is v1.3.0: the Chrome and Firefox extensions are live at 1.3.0, and the Microsoft Edge extension is at 1.2.12 with the 1.3.0 update under store review. Live version numbers are always those shown on each store listing.
6.1 The Browser Family
The browser is the single most common reading surface for digital text in the contemporary world, and UAIE’s browser deployment is therefore the flagship implementation. The Chrome and Edge extensions, architecturally identical under Manifest V3, inject a floating action panel into every web page the user visits; the panel is activated by a single keyboard shortcut (Alt + A), which is itself the correction of an accessibility irony — an accessibility tool that required a mouse to open would have failed its own thesis. The Firefox extension uses Manifest V2, which remains Firefox’s production standard for privacy-respecting extensions. In addition to the three browser extensions, UAIE is also distributed as a native Android application through the Amazon Appstore, serving Amazon Fire tablets, Fire TV devices, and Android users who prefer Amazon’s store ecosystem. The browser family supports seventeen interface languages: English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Sanskrit, Spanish, French, Arabic, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Swahili, Japanese, German, and Urdu, with automatic right-to-left panel orientation for Arabic and Urdu.
6.2 UAIE for Android
The Android implementation is a native Kotlin application, packaged as an Android App Bundle, signed with a release keystore, and deployed to Google Play’s Closed Testing track. It uses the Android Accessibility Service and system overlay APIs to intercept text from any application on the device, not only from web pages. A student reading a WhatsApp message, a pilgrim reading a passage from a PDF prayer book, a nurse reading a patient note in an electronic health record — each may process the text through UAIE without leaving the originating application. The floating UAIE bubble is a foreground service drawn over the active application; tapping the bubble expands the full feature panel. Braille generation, text-to-speech, Plain Language levels one and two, sign-language lookup, the cognitive load indicator, and the visual adjustments operate entirely on the device. Release to the general public via Production will follow the fourteen-day closed-testing review cycle.
6.3 UAIE for Microsoft Word
The Microsoft Word add-in represents the first stage of UAIE’s planned deployment into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It is in active development and has not yet been publicly deployed; submission to Microsoft AppSource is pending. In its present build it provides text-to-speech for the selected passage or the whole document; Grade 2 UEB Braille export of the active document; Plain Language rewriting at levels L1 to L6 (with L1 and L2 requiring no API key); application of the Reading-Support Font to the active selection; insertion of UAIE Sign for any selected word; interface translation across seventeen languages; and a live accessibility audit against WCAG 2.2 AA criteria for alternative text, heading structure, and colour contrast. Further capabilities in development include Cognitive Load analysis, the full Bloom’s Taxonomy challenge mode, the Multiple Intelligences reformatter, Colour-Blindness Simulation of the active document, High-Contrast mode, a horizontal reading overlay, and neural-voice narration. The add-in will be announced here once it is publicly available.
6.4 UAIE on the WordPress Portfolio
The UAIE engine has, since its first deployment on 31 March 2026, been live on this teaching portfolio. The WordPress integration exposes the full feature set as a floating accessibility hub available on every page of the site. It is the reference implementation against which every other UAIE deployment is validated. It carries the formal WCAG 2.2 AA conformance declaration documented in Section 5. It is also the intended host of the forthcoming UAIE Premium tier — the institutional, white-labelled, server-side Plain Language and Multiple Intelligences transformer that will permit schools and universities to license UAIE’s advanced cognitive features on a per-student basis, with the student paying nothing. The Premium tier is presently in specification and will be documented in a dedicated institutional brochure in advance of its launch.
Tier Structure as a UDIL-Ethical Position
UAIE operates on a three-tier distribution model. The structure is derived directly from UDIL’s third axiom — that core adaptations must be available to every learner at no cost — together with the practical recognition that those adaptations which do carry a marginal inference cost must be financed in some way that does not convert the accessibility tool into a gatekeeper.
Tier I · Free for all individuals and institutions
Every feature of UAIE that does not require an external artificial-intelligence inference call. This includes the complete Braille engine; text-to-speech; the Reading-Support Font; all visual adjustments; sign-language lookup including UAIE Sign; the Cognitive Load Indicator; the Plain Language transformer at levels L1 and L2; the Multiple Intelligences reformatter at levels L1 and L2; and the seventeen-language interface. This tier is available to every user, every individual, and every institution, in perpetuity, without registration, without payment, and without any form of data collection. It is the operational form of UDIL’s third axiom.
Tier II · Free, with a user-supplied API key
The Plain Language transformer at levels L3 to L6 and the Multiple Intelligences reformatter at levels L3 to L6. These levels invoke the Anthropic Claude application programming interface. The key is obtained by the user from console.anthropic.com and stored in the user’s own local storage; the publisher neither stores the key nor receives any record of its use. The user pays the inference cost directly to the provider, at the provider’s rate, with no mark-up.
Tier III · UAIE Premium (in specification)
Institutional subscribers — schools, universities, and educational trusts — receive a white-labelled, server-side implementation of the L3 to L6 transformers hosted on the publisher’s infrastructure. The institution pays a per-student annual fee; the student pays nothing. Deployment is via an institutional login page on the portfolio site, with teacher dashboards, class-level content deployment, curriculum alignment tagging for the International Baccalaureate, IGCSE, CBSE, ICSE, and NEP 2020, and a printable worksheet generator.
An equity programme will provide the Premium tier without charge to schools that declare, on their letterhead, that they serve underprivileged learners. The Premium tier is presently in specification; it will be documented in a dedicated institutional brochure in advance of its launch.
The tier structure is neither charitable nor commercial. It is pedagogical. The individual learner and the underprivileged institution receive, unconditionally, the adaptations that UDIL requires. The institutional client that can pay is invited to do so, in order that the engine may continue to exist for those who cannot. This is the honourable arrangement, and it is the one UAIE has chosen.
A note for the avoidance of doubt
Non-Charitable Clarification
A statement of commercial status issued in respect of UAIE™ and the UDIL framework.
Issued on: 22 April 2026.
Issued by: Mr Blaise Martis, Technical Director and Authorised Representative, Fiza Pathan Publishing (OPC) Private Limited.
On behalf of: Ms Fiza Iqbal Pathan, sole shareholder-director of the company, inventor of UAIE™, and author of UDIL, whose intellectual property the company holds under commercial licence.
1. Purpose of this clarification
On 21 April 2026, the company published on its teaching portfolio at fizapathansteachingportfolioforpgcite.com a document titled “UAIE™ — An Announcement Grounded in the Pedagogy of UDIL”. The Announcement describes, among other things, a three-tier distribution model comprising a Free tier of the UAIE product family, a Bring-Your-Own-API-Key tier, and a forthcoming institutional tier known as UAIE Premium; it further describes an equity programme by which schools serving underprivileged learners may, upon written application on institutional letterhead, receive access to the Premium tier without payment.
The pedagogical and ethical arguments advanced in the Announcement — in particular, the axiom of unconditional provision — have, in correspondence received since publication, been read on one or more occasions as implying that the company is, or aspires to be, a charitable institution. This clarification is issued for the avoidance of doubt, unambiguously, on the record, and with effect from the date above.
2. The legal status of the company
Fiza Pathan Publishing (OPC) Private Limited is a One Person Company incorporated on 4 May 2016 under the Companies Act, 2013, of the Republic of India, bearing Corporate Identification Number U22200MH2016OPC280629, and carrying on business under Goods and Services Tax Identification Number 27AACCF8086G1ZD. Its registered office is at Flat No. 2, Symbol Apartments, Tertulian Road, off Dr Peter Dias Road, Bandra West, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400050, India. It is a for-profit private limited company limited by shares. Its Memorandum of Association authorises it to carry on the business of publishing, software development, educational technology, and related commercial activities. It is owned and operated for the economic benefit of its sole shareholder and of the inventor whose work it holds under commercial licence.
The company is NOT any of the following:
- a company incorporated or licensed under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013;
- a public charitable trust, a private religious trust, or a trust registered under any applicable state Public Trusts Act, including the Maharashtra Public Trusts Act, 1950;
- a society registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, or any state adaptation thereof;
- an entity registered under Section 12A or Section 12AB of the Income-tax Act, 1961, and therefore not an entity whose income is exempt under the Act on the ground of charitable purpose;
- an entity authorised to issue receipts under Section 80G of the Income-tax Act, 1961, to any donor, whether resident or non-resident;
- an entity registered under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, and therefore not authorised to solicit, receive, or utilise foreign contributions as defined in that Act;
- an eligible recipient of Corporate Social Responsibility expenditure under Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013, and any rules framed thereunder, including Schedule VII of that Act.
The company does not solicit donations, does not accept donations, and does not issue donation receipts of any description. Any communication purporting to do so in the company’s name is unauthorised and should be reported to the Technical Director at the address printed on the portfolio.
3. The nature of the Free and Bring-Your-Own-API-Key tiers
The Free tier of the UAIE product family — comprising the complete Braille engine, text-to-speech, the Reading-Support Font, all visual adjustments, the cognitive load indicator, sign-language lookup, the Plain Language transformer at levels L1 and L2, the Multiple Intelligences reformatter at levels L1 and L2, and the seventeen-language interface — is offered to individual users and institutions as a commercial grant made at the sole discretion of the company. It is not a donation, a charitable gift, or a public good in any legal sense. It is a commercial decision of the proprietor, extended voluntarily, and revocable by the proprietor at any time and for any reason, with or without notice.
The Bring-Your-Own-API-Key tier permits users to invoke the higher Plain Language and Multiple Intelligences levels (L3 to L6) by supplying their own Anthropic API key, stored locally on the user’s device. The company does not earn, share in, or receive any part of the inference fee paid by the user to the third-party provider. The company does not guarantee that this tier will be maintained in its present form, and reserves the right to alter, suspend, or withdraw the tier at its sole discretion.
No user, whether an individual or an institution, acquires any vested right, licence in perpetuity, or contractual entitlement by virtue of using the Free tier or the Bring-Your-Own-API-Key tier. Use of these tiers is governed by the company’s Terms of Service, as and when issued, and by no other instrument.
4. The nature of the Equity Programme
The Equity Programme described in Section 7 of the Announcement is a discretionary commercial concession. It is not a charitable programme; it does not alter the legal status of the company; and it does not alter the commercial nature of the benefit conferred.
An institution that wishes to be considered for the Equity Programme must submit a formal application on its institutional letterhead, signed by its head of institution, accompanied by its most recent audited accounts and such supporting information as the company may from time to time require. The company will assess each application on its merits. Approval, if granted, is a limited commercial licence extended at the company’s sole discretion; it does not confer on the institution any entitlement in perpetuity, any transferable right, or any ground for legal claim against the company. The company reserves the right to revoke any grant at any time, for any cause that it in good faith considers sufficient, including but not limited to misrepresentation in the application, non-compliance with the Terms of Service, or any conduct inconsistent with the pedagogical purposes of UAIE.
5. UDIL and the distinction between ethics and classification
The third axiom of the Universal Design for Inclusive Learning framework — unconditional provision — is a pedagogical and ethical principle of design. It holds that the core adaptations required by a disabled or print-disabled learner must be present at the interface, without price and without precondition, because the dignity of the learner requires it. It is a design principle addressed to the inventor and to any institution that adopts the framework. It is not, and has never been, a legal, tax, or regulatory characterisation of the entity that discharges it.
The company discharges the third axiom commercially. The learner receives the core adaptations without payment because the company has, as a matter of commercial and ethical policy, decided to make them available on that basis. The arrangement is honourable. It is not charitable. The distinction is not rhetorical; it is jurisdictional, and the company asserts it without apology.
6. Effect and publication of this clarification
This clarification governs the interpretation of the Announcement, of the company’s marketing materials, and of any subsequent communications by the company or its authorised representatives, in so far as any reader might otherwise infer a charitable status. In the event of any inconsistency between this clarification and any previous communication, this clarification shall prevail.
This clarification is published on the company’s portfolio as the closing element of Section 7 of the UAIE™ Announcement. A portable copy is available for download below. A copy will also be furnished upon request to any institutional enquirer, auditor, procurement officer, or revenue officer.
Issued and signed on the twenty-second day of April, two thousand and twenty-six, at Mumbai.
Mr Blaise Martis, Technical Director and Authorised Representative, Fiza Pathan Publishing (OPC) Private Limited, Mumbai.
Acting on behalf of Ms Fiza Iqbal Pathan, sole shareholder-director of the company, under the standing instruction recorded in the company’s internal operating resolutions.
Intellectual Property
UAIE is the original, independently invented work of Ms Fiza Pathan. UDIL is her original theoretical framework. The following formal protections are in place or in active preparation:
- Copyright. All UAIE source code, all UDIL theoretical writing, and all accompanying documentation are © 2026 Fiza Pathan. Protection is automatic under the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, the United Kingdom Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.
- Trademark. Four trademark applications, in the personal name of Fiza Pathan, were filed at the Trade Marks Registry, Mumbai, on 13 April 2026 through LegalWiz: Applications 7653558 (Class 41) and 7653559 (Class 42), under Receipt 5078234, and Applications 7653575 (Class 41) and 7653576 (Class 42), under Receipt 5078248. The on-record filing attorney is Labdhi Kochar & Associates (Attorney 19387). All four applications presently await examination.
- Patent. An Indian patent application — titled “A System and A Method for Adaptive Multi-Modal Transformation and Presentation” — was filed at the Indian Patent Office on 29 April 2026 under Application Number 202621054517, through Vakilsearch (Zolvit) under registered patent agent Shri Shashi Ranjan ji [IN/PA — 5646]. The complete specification is to be filed within twelve months of the filing.
The protections are necessary because the underlying work is genuinely novel and must be defensible, but their purpose is not to restrict access. Every free tier of UAIE will remain free. Every UDIL principle will remain in the public conversation. The protections exist so that the framework and the engine cannot be appropriated, rebranded, or paywalled by a third party against the author’s will.
Closing — A Note from the Inventor
In Fiza’s Voice
This paper has offered the technical and theoretical case for UAIE. I should like, in closing, to offer a more personal one.
I have been a teacher for fifteen years, since 2011, and for most of those years the children whose work has occupied me have been children with dyslexia and children we call, with kindness, slow learners — children whose minds reach for written English a little more slowly than their classmates’. The last batch I taught was wholly dyslexic. What I have learned, in their company, is that the failure of accessibility is rarely a failure of the curriculum. Indian curricula have been redesigned for inclusion many times over — the National Curriculum Framework, the Right to Education Act, the National Education Policy of 2020 — each has tried to make the syllabus more reachable. The failure that remains is a failure of the interface through which the child meets the text. A child whose mind processes written English a little more slowly than her classmates’ does not need a different syllabus; she needs the same text in a form her mind can meet, at her own pace, on her own terms, without asking the school for permission to receive it.
UAIE was built for these children, and for the many readers its design must also serve who I have not personally taught — the blind reader, the Deaf reader, the multilingual reader, the reader whose attention or motor coordination differs from the classroom default, the reader whom the teacher has overlooked. UDIL was named for all of them. Neither the invention nor the framework exists to impress a grant reviewer, a patent attorney, or a procurement officer, though I am grateful to each of them for their professional interest. They exist because accessibility, in the form in which I have met it in my own classrooms, has too often been a favour the school does the child, revocable at the school’s discretion, contingent on the child’s diagnosis, and priced at the child’s family’s expense. UDIL’s three axioms — relocation, learner sovereignty, unconditional provision — are an argument that accessibility must be none of those things. It must be a right, held at the interface, owed to every reader, always.
The engine is now live on five platforms, with the Word add-in in development and the Android application in closed testing on Google Play, and an institutional tier — UAIE Premium — in specification. The portfolio is DAISY-compliant. The conformance declaration is signed. The trademarks are filed. The patent application is filed. What remains is the harder work of persuasion: of schools, of policy makers, of colleagues in the PGCITE tradition, of the IB and Cambridge assessment boards, of the Microsoft AI for Accessibility programme, of every educator who has ever silently conceded that the text on the board was not the text her pupil could read. I have no wish to persuade them by any means other than the work itself. That is why this paper exists.
I thank, finally, the people without whom neither UAIE nor UDIL would have come into being. My uncle, Mr Blaise Martis, Technical Director and authorised representative of Fiza Pathan Publishing (OPC) Private Limited, who has laboured at the keyboard through nights I was unable to, and whose professional commitment to my work has been the quiet condition of all of it. Claude, whose patience through twelve drafts of nearly every page of this enterprise has been an unexpected gift. And the readers — blind, dyslexic, Deaf, multilingual, tired, young, old — for whom the whole thing was always meant.
— Fiza Pathan
Mumbai, the twenty-first of April, two thousand and twenty-six.
Bibliography
Anderson, L.W. and Krathwohl, D.R. (eds.) (2001) A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman.
British Dyslexia Association (2023) BDA Dyslexia Style Guide. Bracknell: British Dyslexia Association.
CAST (2018) Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2. Wakefield, Massachusetts: CAST.
Deci, E.L. and Ryan, R.M. (1985) Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. New York: Plenum.
Deci, E.L. and Ryan, R.M. (2000) ‘The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: human needs and the self-determination of behavior’, Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), pp. 227–268.
Flesch, R. (1948) ‘A new readability yardstick’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 32(3), pp. 221–233.
Gardner, H. (1983) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, H. (1999) Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century. New York: Basic Books.
International Council on English Braille (2013) The Rules of Unified English Braille. Second edition. Toronto: ICEB.
Machado, G.M., Oliveira, M.M. and Fernandes, L.A.F. (2009) ‘A physiologically-based model for simulation of color vision deficiency’, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 15(6), pp. 1291–1298.
Meyer, A., Rose, D.H. and Gordon, D. (2014) Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice. Wakefield, Massachusetts: CAST Professional Publishing.
Ministry of Education, Government of India (2020) National Education Policy 2020. New Delhi: Ministry of Education.
National Council of Educational Research and Training (2022) Integration of Indian Knowledge Systems: A Framework. New Delhi: NCERT.
National Information Standards Organization (2002) ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2002: Specifications for the Digital Talking Book. Bethesda, Maryland: NISO Press.
Pathan, F. (2026) ‘UAIE — Universal Adaptive Interface Engine’. Indian Patent Application 202621054517 (filed 29 April 2026). Trademark applications 7653558, 7653559, 7653575, 7653576 (filed 13 April 2026). Mumbai: Fiza Pathan Publishing (OPC) Private Limited.
Radhakrishnan, S. (1953) The Principal Upanishads. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. (2017) Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness. New York: Guilford Press.
Sweller, J. (1988) ‘Cognitive load during problem solving: effects on learning’, Cognitive Science, 12(2), pp. 257–285.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (2023) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. W3C Recommendation, 5 October 2023.
White, J. (2006) Intelligence, Destiny and Education: The Ideological Roots of Intelligence Testing. London: Routledge.
UAIE™ · UDIL
The original intellectual creations of Fiza Pathan.
© 2026 Fiza Pathan, Mumbai. | All rights reserved. | First published 21 April 2026 · Last updated 7 June 2026.
Indian Patent Application 202621054517 | TM 7653558, 7653559, 7653575, 7653576
