Assistive Technology

March 2014 — United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) will partner with Sprint to promote Sprint Relay, a speech-to-speech (STS) service provided for people with hearing and speech disabilities.  Although Sprint Relay has been providing communications assistance for over 20 years, UCP’s newfound partnership with Sprint will help raise awareness of these services.  Specifically, Sprint Relay allows Sprint customers to dial *STS (*787) to directly access STS services and connect with a Communications Assistant (CA).  The service also provides customers with the ability to “email call instructions for the

February 2014 — The GSMA announced the winners of the 19^th Annual Global Mobile awards at a ceremony held at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  The ceremony recognizes new developments in mobile technologies ranging from health and banking to network infrastructure.  The 2014 award winners included assistive technologies, such as Turkcell Dream Partner a mobile application with text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology, Wibbitz Text-to-Video Technology a mobile app which can convert text articles into videos, and the Magic Pencil, a distance learning device created

February 2014 — The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has begun accepting nominations for the third annual Chairman’s Awards for Advancement in Accessibility (Chairman’s AAA).  The awards are designed to “honor outstanding private and public sector ventures that advance accessibility for people with disabilities.” Nominations may be made for mainstream or assistive technologies, standards, or best practices for the following areas:

Today, AT&T Foundation announced a $50,000 contribution to Shepherd Center to assist researchers in the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Wireless Technologies (Wireless RERC) in launching a series of seminars to help consumers with disabilities uncover the range of accessibility features found on their mobile devices. Seminars are scheduled for five cities – Atlanta, Ga., Austin and Dallas, Texas, Chicago, Ill., and Washington, D.C. – throughout this spring and summer. 

January 2014 — The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced the agenda for an Open Meeting to be held on February 20, 2014. The agenda includes considerations for a Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to address the “quality and technical compliance of closed captioning on television programming.” Additionally, the Commission will consider a Third Notice of Proposed Rulemaking regarding the accuracy of caller location information provided for wireless 911 calls.  The meeting will begin at 10:30 a.m.