Meet Leethu Mathai, who develops and manages BindiMaps’ iOS mobile app.

Leethu is a very experienced mobile developer and most of her 9+ years’ experience has been in developing applications for corporate and industrial clients in insurance, energy and banking. 

She first heard about BindiMaps at an event hosted by the female tech entrepreneur accelerator program SheStarts, in which BindiMaps’s founder and CEO Anna was a participant. 

Leethu’s favourite aspect of working on the BindiMaps app is the opportunity to dig deep into the important potential of Apple’s VoiceOver voice interface, which helps Apple users with a vision impairment use hearing and speech instead of touch and typing.

But BindiMaps is not just text-to-speech. Using her expertise in VoiceOver, Leethu is able to optimise and refine BindiMaps’ unique navigation language structure and apply it to our user interface, so that the right navigation instructions are spoken to the user at just the right time.

“When I first got to spend time with our vision-impaired users, I got to learn so much about working with users with a disability, and it reinforced my belief that the best technology products are those which have all the product requirements coming from the user, rather than building a set of features and trying to make the users use it.”

She says her experience as a young mother helped her appreciate the importance of BindiMaps to sighted users as well as the vision-impaired.

“My daughter is now four years old but I can tell you, when she was younger, there were many times I was left juggling a child, a pram and shopping bags while desperately trying to find the location of the nearest baby change room. I don’t know of any other solution that solves this problem as well as BindiMaps!”

In her free time, Leethu is a busy parent who is grateful for the occasional opportunity to spend valued time dressmaking and designing patterns for dresses.