Assistive Technology

April 2014 – Robyn Powell, Attorney Advisor for the National Council on Disability (NCD), testified before the Massachusetts legislature concerning the rights of parents with disabilities.

April 2014 — Starkey has released Halo, a new hearing aid which is designed to be compatible with iPhones, iPads and iPods. Halo hearing aids act as stand-alone hearing aids but have the added feature of using Bluetooth to connect directly to wireless devices. Using the TruLink Hearing Control app, Halo users can use their iPhone to stream calls, music and Facetime directly to the hearing aid. The app also enables users to remotely adjust hearing aid settings and create TruLink Memories, which geotags and saves hearing aid settings for specific locations.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has issued final rules in accordance with Section 713 of the Communications Act to enhance the quality of closed captioning.  Despite previous rules, the FCC has continually received comments noting that captions are often found to be “inaccurate, garbled, incomplete, misspelled and/or misunderstood, incomprehensible, obscure the speaker, or significantly lag behind the spoken words they are intended to convey.”  The final rules require that captions are accurate and synchronous in portraying the spoken words and background noises, are present for