Google Gives $20 Million for Tech Efforts to Aid Disabled

Google.org, the Internet giant’s philanthropic arm, awarded $20 million in grants Tuesday to 30 organizations with a focus on technological innovations to improve the daily lives of disabled people, Wired writes. The grants, which include six awards of more than $1 million, will go to groups working on solutions for the disabled in education, communication, mobility, independence, and employment.

Reflecting Google’s engineering-driven approach to giving, the firm committed last spring to fund tech projects to assist people with disabilities via its Global Impact Challenge grant program. Recipients include the Center for Discovery, which is creating a way to convert any manual wheelchair into more mobile electric one, and Click2Speak, which is developing a multilingual keyboard that can be controlled by joysticks, eye movements, and other means.