Crystal Yang Built Audemy From One Wordle Game. Now Its Audio Games Reach Blind Students Nationwide

In 2021, Crystal Yang was a high school freshman in the Houston area when the whole country seemed to be playing Wordle. One of her friends could not. The game was entirely visual, with no audio or tactile version, so a blind classmate was shut out of the most talked-about puzzle of the year. That summer Yang wrote an audio version she called Heardle. It became the first game of Audemy, the nonprofit she founded and runs as chief executive.

Five years later Audemy is one of the more unusual entries on the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2026. It sells nothing to consumers and has no venture investors. According to Forbes, it has raised $250,000 in sponsorship and grants, and its educational audio games are now used in every state school for the blind in the United States.

The gap Audemy was built to close

The problem Yang found was bigger than one game. While refining Heardle in a summer research program at Texas A&M University, she came across a statistic that reframed the project: more than 70% of blind and visually impaired students are at least one grade level behind their sighted peers, largely because accessible learning materials are scarce. Yang has cited that figure in interviews with Points of Light and with the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

Mainstream games are no better. Forbes notes that only about 0.001% of game titles are fully accessible to blind players. For a student who cannot see the screen, most educational apps and nearly all popular games are closed.

Yang's answer was to build learning games that run entirely on sound. Audemy's titles, aimed at children from kindergarten through eighth grade, teach maths and language through audio cues and spoken prompts. A game called Car Counting uses sound effects to teach counting, and Shape Shark teaches geometry, according to a March 2026 profile in 34th Street Magazine.

How the games are made

The technology is modest by Silicon Valley standards and deliberate in its design. Players hear questions and answer out loud. Intel, one of Audemy's sponsors, has described how the games use its OpenVINO toolkit to convert text to speech and interpret spoken replies.

The testing process is where Yang's approach stands out. Audemy works with schools for the blind in several states, and games are revised through repeated rounds of feedback from teachers and students, sometimes as many as 50, according to 34th Street. Yang has traveled to state schools to watch students play. As she told the magazine, the students are "the ones who inform the decision-making of the final product."

Beyond its own titles, Audemy has produced more than 100 toolkits that teach blind teens and adults to use sound cues and accessibility shortcuts in mainstream games such as Minecraft, Valorant and Roblox, Forbes reports. An Audemy Accessibility Studio works with developers and studios that want to build accessibility into their games.

A nonprofit model with no revenue target

Audemy's finances are small and transparent in outline. The $250,000 it has raised, as reported by Forbes, came from corporate sponsors and grant makers including Intel, Amazon, Google for Nonprofits and the Taco Bell Foundation. The work is carried by volunteers: more than 60 developers, grant writers and outreach members from universities including Northwestern, UC Berkeley and UC Irvine, according to 34th Street.

That structure keeps the games free to the students who use them, but it also ties Audemy's growth to grants and sponsorships rather than sales. Expanding into new subjects and grade levels, which Yang has named as a priority, depends on finding more of both.

What Forbes recognised

Forbes named Crystal Yang to its 30 Under 30 Games list for 2026. Its profile credits Audemy with more than 50 educational audio games, more than 100 accessibility toolkits and $250,000 in sponsorship and grants, and says Yang became the youngest woman ever featured in a federal policy announcement for gaming.

From Katy, Texas, to Wharton

Yang is now a first-year student in the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania, a dual-degree track between Wharton and Penn Engineering. Before college she was named a Daily Point of Light honoree in June 2024 and received the Yellow Rose of Texas Award the same year for her work with blind students. She has also published research on conversational interfaces for blind and visually impaired users at the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction in Paris.

At Penn she has stepped back to a more advisory role at Audemy to balance her studies, 34th Street reported in March. "Back in the day, Audemy was kind of my main thing," she told the magazine.

What comes next for Crystal Yang and Audemy

Yang has said she wants to expand Audemy's curriculum into more subjects and grade levels, partner with more schools and educators, and adapt difficulty and pacing to each learner. "Long-term, I'm excited to integrate accessibility as a core design principle in the gaming and edtech space," she told Wharton's Management and Technology program in February.

For an organisation of Audemy's size, that is an ambitious agenda. It is also a reminder of how much of the accessibility gap in education and gaming has been left to small teams and volunteers. Audemy began as one student's fix for one friend. Whether it can become standard equipment in classrooms for blind students will depend less on the code than on whether schools, sponsors and game studios keep paying for it.