Touro Graduate School of Technology

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IN PLAIN SITE

A TECH GRADUATE FOCUSED ON MAKING DISCOVERY CHANNEL’S ONLINE COOKING SITE EASY ON THE EYES

Anil Chalasani knows better than most, that cooking and baking have become an obsession for many during the isolation of this pandemic. Chalasani does not bake endless loaves of banana bread like so many other Americans who are hungry for human contact. But he does make it much easier for them to do so.

Chalasani is a User Interface Experience Designer at the Discovery Channel. In plain English, the impressive title means that he and his team have been working on innovative ways to modernize Discovery’s online cooking site. The mission was to take its circa 1990s technology from confusing and clunky and make it an easy, intuitive place to find and follow recipes.

“As the pandemic started, lots of people wanted to cook and they desperately needed recipes and a good site to find them on,” says Chalasani, 32, based in Knoxville. “We wanted to make it fun, as well as functional.”

To accomplish those goals, Chalasani determined that he and his team had to make the website much more user-friendly, in this case, specifically for those who are visually disabled due to everything from cataracts to color blindness. Employing Color Brightness Technology, which was not around in the ‘90s, Chalasani has been doing just that. “There are 12 different categories of visual disabilities,” explains Chalasani, who has been teaching his colleagues the technology, which he learned before he went to work for Discovery 18 months ago. “Some people can’t see blue or red, others see only black and white. My intent is to help them fully enjoy everything the site has to offer.”

The road to web designing and to graduate school at Touro College was a rough one. Chalasani had come to San Francisco from India to attend art school after he was sponsored by his elder brother, Manju. Shortly thereafter, Manju was killed in a motorcycle accident. While grieving for his brother, he lost his sponsorship and financial aid, and believed it was his duty to return to India to care for his parents. A friend told him about Touro. By then, Chalasani knew he wanted to concentrate on web design.

With his parents’ blessing, Chalasani applied and was accepted to the Touro Graduate School of Technology, from which he graduated from the Web and Multimedia Design program in 2017. “Going to Touro was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,” says Chalasani, whose avocations include oil painting and nature photography. “Today, I’m working at something I love and helping people in the process. That is very exciting and rewarding for me.”