We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Crystal Yang a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Crystal, appreciate you joining us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

I learned about assistive technology when my friend, who is blind, wasn’t able to play my favorite game, Wordle. I spent my summer creating an audio-based version of Wordle, Heard-le,and it was super rewarding the see her play the game.

Through building Heard-le, I learned about the challenges that blind students face. Many tools that sighted people can use are not available for blind students, resulting in the statistic that over 70 percent of blind students are at least a grade level behind in school.

I wanted to change this, inspiring me to build Audemy, the world’s largest educational game platform for blind students.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hey! I’m Crystal Yang, and I love combining tech with social impact. My journey in computer science started pretty early, and it’s led me to work on some pretty cool projects, which in total have impacted 50,000+ people!

Currently, I’m building Audemy—an educational platform for blind and visually impaired students.

Audemy actually started in kind of a random way. I was playing Wordle with friends, and one of them, who’s blind, couldn’t join in because the game wasn’t accessible. That really got me thinking about how many educational tools aren’t designed for people with disabilities. So, I built an audio-based version of Wordle to fix that. From there, Audemy grew into something way bigger. Now, it provides games and learning tools for over 1,000 blind students across seven schools worldwide, all focused on making education more accessible through audio-based interfaces and assistive tech.

One of my favorite parts of this journey is working with a team of volunteers who are just as passionate about accessibility as I am. We’ve built 12 different games so far! My favorite one is called Story Builder, which is kind of like Mad Libs but designed to help blind students improve their storytelling and language skills. It’s amazing to see how much joy these games bring to the students, and it’s honestly one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.

What sets Audemy apart is how we’ve focused on creating solutions that really work for the people using them. I’ve spent a lot of time getting feedback from teachers and students to make sure we’re building things that meet their needs. Plus, I love that we’re growing a community of people who care about using tech to solve real-world problems.

At the end of the day, Audemy is all about making education better and more accessible for everyone. I’m really proud of the impact we’ve made so far, and I’m excited to keep pushing the boundaries of what tech can do to help people.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Getting clients is easy when you make something that people need.

To make sure your product addresses a want/need, it is crucial to build a product with the customers.

I first had the idea for audemy when I found a lack of educational platforms for blind students. I started by making a—somewhat crappy—MVP (Minimum Viable Product) which consisted of basic functions: audio-output, math questions, and automatic speech recognition.

I had no idea what to do next or how to make the tech accessible, so I went to a teacher at the Kansas School for the Blind. She helped me with advice to implement: more engaging problems, and keyboard interaction. I did this process multiple times, with many different teachers. (Side note, I was able to do this quickly since I was building a CS project. This wouldn’t be possible to do as fast if I was building through another medium, for example something physical like electrical engineering. This is part of the reason I really love computer science.)

Ultimately, my product was able to fit the needs of many teachers. The first customers were easy to get: they were the teachers who wanted access to the product that would directly help their lessons and their students.

Currently, Audemy is in 7 schools for the blind and has reached 1000+ blind students!

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

I tackled funding for Audemy in 2 ways: grants and competitions.

Audemy functions as a non-profit, so a large amount of funding has mainly come in through the form of grants. To find grants, my biggest piece of advice would be to go as niche as possible. Personally, I’ve had lots of success getting grants from organizations targeted towards inspiring youth to create non-profit based initiatives. In general, if you find a more niche grant category, there will be less competition and hopefully more success.

Since Audemy is a tech-based business, there are many competitions available for us to compete in for prize money. For example, we recently won $5,000 from Intel’s Global AI Competition. In tech-land, there are many tech centered competitions, where you make a product and present it to judges. There is oftentimes a theme or specific technology required to integrate in the project. Many competitions prefer projects that make a large social impact, which has been fairly beneficial for Audemy.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://yangcrystal.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/crustaly/
• Twitter: https://x.com/AudemyApp