Assistive Technology

April 16, 2013 — The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) announced that AT&T, Best Buy, Panasonic, Regal Entertainment Group and Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) are the 2013 Access Award winners. This award is given annually to those individuals, corporations and organizations that AFB recognizes as substantially improving the accessibility experiences of individuals with vision loss. Carl R.

April 2013 — The Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) released the report ODEP Accomplishments 2009—2012, highlighting ODEP’s progress in ensuring that individuals with disabilities are considered and included when improving the job opportunities for American workers.

March 2013 — In March, U.S. Senator Tom Harkins (D-Iowa) introduced two bills to Congress that would expand the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to provide closed captioning on movies shown in movie theaters and on all airplanes. The purpose of the bills is to improve the accessibility of movies to individuals with disabilities. The Cinema Act [S.555.IS] would require that all movie theaters with two or more theaters or screening rooms showing copyrighted motion pictures provide captioning and video description.

John Morris, a Wireless RERC research scientist attended the Assistive Technology Industry Association’s 2013 Conference where he participated in the panel “Mobile Apps for People with Disabilities” at the Research Symposium on IDevices, Apps & the Cloud. The conference provided a forum for professional practitioners serving those with disabilities to communicate and participate in educational sessions. There were over 2,000 attendees for the more than 200 educational sessions at the conference, held in Orlando, Florida from January 30 to February 2, 2013.

On February 15, 2013 James Mueller, a Wireless RERC scientist, presented “Getting Wireless: An Introduction to Universal Design and Wireless Technology” to 32 sophomore industrial design students at Virginia Tech.  This is part of the Wireless RERC’s initiative to educate the next generation of wireless technology designers on universal design as a core practice for innovative and future design of products and applications.

The specific objectives of the project are to: