Oleh Lepetiuk, 54, is a tall, imposing man, in a crisp dark grey suit, whose head almost scrapes the low ceiling of his office in central Kharkiv – a couple of pokey basement rooms with sharp corners that his 23-year-old daughter helps him manoeuvre.

Oleh is one of the founders of the Blind Lawyer Association of Ukraine. He is visually impaired himself, and has been practicing law for almost 30 years with a special focus on disability cases.

Law studies do not have a reputation for being easy and they certainly weren’t for Oleh in 1990s Ukraine, where notions of accessibility were non-existent. One artefact remains from that time: a brown and bulky tape recorder, covered in dust, that he carried to class every single day.

“It weighs four kilograms. I couldn’t find a dictaphone in Kharkiv at the time, so I had a local guy install a handmade microphone into the tape recorder to record lectures. It’s very precious to me, I just can’t throw it away.”

In the evenings, Oleh would painstakingly transcribe his law lectures of the day into Braille. He then asked friends to read out his textbooks, which he would also record in his brown tape recorder, creating a collection of homemade audiobooks of sorts.

That’s how the idea behind the Blind Lawyer Association sprouted. Oleh and four other blind law students gathered together to pool their resources.

“We wanted to help future students and provide them with our textbooks, our lecture notes, and our recordings, because there were no computers back then, no technical support.”

Defending people with disabilities and striving for a more accessible society has been Oleh’s life work – he created his association in 1998 – but it’s taken on a new meaning since the first days of the full-scale invasion.

First came the pleas for help. They came from visually impaired people, most of them elderly and on their own, who had no one to turn to.