The 30-day internship program, jointly organized by Zendalona and Ahalia School of Engineering and Technology, ran from June 1 to July 2, 2026, and brought together student presentations, laboratory-based technical work, and a structured series of interactions with placed alumni and industry-connected resource persons. The internship continues in a remote format for a further five months beyond the on-campus phase, allowing interns to keep contributing to live projects after returning to their regular academic schedules.
Beyond its technical component, the program’s central emphasis was on strengthening the placement pipeline for the college, connecting interns directly with individuals who had recently secured positions at reputed companies and using their first-hand experiences to prepare the current batch for upcoming placement drives. Interns were not merely spectators in this process: they were given real, production-grade open-source work to contribute to, under the mentorship of Zendalona’s development team, so that the technical and placement-oriented halves of the program reinforced one another.
This report documents the venues and facilities used, the nature of the technical work undertaken by the interns, the day-wise flow of activities, and, in particular, the resource persons and placement-related interactions that took place over the course of the internship.
Four venues were used across the duration of the internship, each suited to the particular nature of the sessions held there. Vishweshvaraya Hall served as the venue for Days 1 and 2, and again on June 16 and 17, hosting the inaugural sessions, industry talks, and larger presentations; it was equipped with microphone, projector, and TV/display facilities suitable for addressing the full batch of interns at once.
Lab 3 was the primary venue for the bulk of the internship, in use from June 3 onward. It was equipped with Wi-Fi, Ethernet connectivity, computer systems, and speaker facilities, and served as the base for the daily presentations, coding sessions, and interactive discussions that formed the backbone of the program. Lab 1 was used for the concluding two days of the internship, July 1 and 2, providing a change of setting for the final presentations and wrap-up activities. The ASET Boardroom, meanwhile, was reserved for more focused, smaller-group interactions: placement talks, group discussions, the mock interview session, and the industrial-facilities talk delivered by Sam Thomas.
The technical core of the internship was built around live, real-world open-source projects maintained by Zendalona, an organization dedicated to building free and open-source accessibility software for persons with visual impairment. Rather than working through simulated exercises, interns were onboarded directly onto Zendalona’s active codebases, so that their contributions had a genuine chance of shipping to real users.
Accessible-Coconut and the accessible software suite
A significant portion of the internship was devoted to Accessible-Coconut, a community-driven GNU/Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu MATE that is built from the ground up to be usable entirely without vision. Interns were introduced to the distribution’s architecture and to the accessibility stack that underlies it, including screen-reader integration through Orca, speech synthesis and Braille output, and the customisations that make the desktop navigable by sound and keyboard alone rather than by sighted interaction with a mouse.
Working alongside Zendalona’s developers, students contributed to the wider Accessible-Coconut software suite, which bundles a screen reader, optical character recognition for reading printed text aloud, an accessible office suite, a sound editor, media players, and a set of educational tools including typing tutors and mathematics games designed for visually impaired learners. Intern tasks in this area ranged from testing new builds of the distribution and filing and triaging accessibility bugs, to writing and refining documentation, and making small code contributions to individual applications in the suite so that they behaved correctly with a screen reader. This gave students hands-on exposure to Linux system internals, packaging, and the particular discipline of accessibility-first software design, where every interface decision has to be validated against how it sounds and behaves for a non-visual user rather than simply how it looks.
PC-in-a-box: compact accessible computing
The second major strand of technical work was centred on Zendalona’s compact, pre-configured accessible computer initiative, informally referred to during the internship as the “PC in a box” project. The idea behind this initiative is to package an entire accessible computing environment, hardware and the Accessible-Coconut software stack together, into a small, affordable, ready-to-use unit that can be handed to a visually impaired user with minimal setup, rather than requiring them to source and configure a full desktop system themselves.
Interns working on this project were involved in configuring and testing the software image for the compact hardware, verifying that accessibility features such as speech output, Braille support, and audio cues worked reliably on constrained hardware, and helping streamline the out-of-box experience so that a new user could power the unit on and be guided through setup entirely by voice. This work exposed students to a different set of concerns from typical desktop development: performance and resource constraints on lightweight hardware, first-boot and onboarding design for non-visual users, and the practical realities of preparing a piece of accessible technology for deployment outside a lab setting, into the hands of end users who depend on it for everyday computing, communication, and learning.
Taken together, the two strands of technical work gave interns a rare opportunity to see accessibility engineering end to end: from the operating-system and application layer in Accessible-Coconut, through to the hardware-and-software packaging challenges of PC-in-a-box. Daily presentations in Lab 3 gave each intern the chance to report progress, demonstrate fixes, and receive feedback from peers and mentors, which kept the work moving at a steady pace and gave quieter contributors a regular platform to explain and defend their technical decisions.
The internship opened on June 1 and 2 with inaugural sessions and presentations in Vishweshvaraya Hall, during which resource person Jyothir, who had been placed at TCS Prime, addressed the interns and set the tone for the placement-oriented thread that would run through the program. From June 3 onward, activity shifted to Lab 3, where daily student presentations began alongside the technical work described above, making use of the lab’s Wi-Fi, Ethernet, computer systems, and speaker facilities.
June 4 saw a placement talk from Seethu Lakshmi, placed at TCS through the Ninja hiring process, held in Lab 3, while June 5 moved to the ASET Boardroom for a talk from Fathima Anzila, who shared her experience of being placed in a core-sector company in the EEE domain. On June 9, Sathya Seelan visited Lab 3 for an interaction session with the interns, with all lab facilities extended for the occasion.
Vishweshvaraya Hall was used again on June 16 and 17 for an industry discussion alongside hands-on sessions, with a gaming and software-development session also held in the Boardroom; the June 17 session made particular use of the hall’s projector and TV/display support. On June 18, a group discussion was held jointly across the ASET Boardroom and Lab 3, led by Sam Thomas. Daily student presentations continued in Lab 3 through June 20, and on the afternoon of June 22 the ASET Boardroom hosted a mock interview session for all interns, giving them practical, individual placement-preparation experience.
June 24 brought a motivational and career-focused talk in Lab 3 from Nihal Rodge, who shared his journey from a tier-3 college and spoke about Google Summer of Code as a career opportunity. On June 29, Sam Thomas returned to the ASET Boardroom to address students on industrial facilities and practices. The internship concluded on July 1 and 2 with final sessions held in Lab 1, bringing the on-campus phase of the program to a close before it continued remotely.
A core strength of this internship was its consistent line-up of resource persons, most of whom were themselves recent placements or industry-connected professionals. Their sessions were designed to give interns direct, practical exposure to what employers look for and how successful placements are achieved, directly supporting the college’s placement outcomes.
Jyothir, a graduate of Government Engineering College, Palakkad, who was placed at TCS Prime, opened the program on Day 1 by sharing insights from his own placement experience. Ajay M, an employee at Zendalona and a graduate of Ahalia School of Engineering and Technology, conducted two sessions: one on June 2 covering Microsoft account sign-in, account management, and access to Microsoft software, and a second on June 4 focused on using digital and software tools effectively.
Seethu Lakshmi, who studied at Muthoot Institute of Engineering and Technology and was placed at TCS through the Ninja hiring process, addressed interns on placement preparation on June 4. Fathima Anzila, from the Department of EEE at NSS College of Engineering, Palakkad, and placed in a core-sector company, shared her first-hand placement journey on June 5. On June 9, Sathya Seelan interacted with the interns and spoke about how visually impaired people approach challenges and think through problems, offering a perspective closely tied to the accessibility focus of the internship’s technical work.
On June 24, Nihal Rodge spoke about growing from a tier-3 college background through self-driven effort, the right network, and seizing opportunities, and introduced Google Summer of Code as a career-leveraging opportunity of particular relevance to students who had just spent weeks contributing to Zendalona’s open-source projects. Finally, on June 29, Sam Thomas Nellikkan, a Consultant at Infosys, addressed students on industrial facilities and practices, rounding out the program’s exposure to real industry expectations.
The internship program successfully combined technical, lab-based learning with a strong and sustained focus on placements. By pairing genuine open-source contribution to Zendalona’s Accessible-Coconut distribution and its accompanying software suite, together with the PC-in-a-box accessible computing initiative, with structured interactions around individuals who had themselves recently secured positions, spanning start-ups, core-sector companies, and open-source-linked opportunities, the program gave interns a realistic and motivating picture of what is achievable, directly in service of the college’s placement goals for the batch.
