We are honored to have Maria Victoria Diaz, Dicapta's President, appointed for a second term with the FCC's Disability Advisory Committee (DAC). The DAC provides advice and recommendations to the Commission on a wide array of disability matters specified by the Federal Communications Commission.
The American Council of the Blind's Audio Description Project (ACB-ADP) and the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) are co-sponsoring an exciting opportunity for blind and visually impaired young people, in four categories from ages 7 to 21: the Benefits of Audio Description in Education (BADIE) contest.
When I was born I was diagnosed with grade III microtia and atresia on my left side and I had a shorter jawbone on that side too. I realized just recently how hard that was for my parents. I was their first child and when they saw their baby missing her left ear, their world crumbled. Fortunately, that has not been a big deal for me. When I was a child, kids sometimes were cruel; but I had opportunities for revenge.
The Center on Technology and Disability (CTD) recently released the video "A Teacher's View of Assistive Technology." In the video, teachers of students with a range of learning needs discuss the ways in which assistive technology can help. Teachers provide examples of low- to high-tech tools that are easily integrated into a classroom environment.
Doctor Juanita Rodriguez is presenting the results of our projects "Captions and Video Description: Educational Tools for Hispanic Children with Disabilities," and "DAD: A collaborative platform to encourage learning through creativity and dialogue" at Edulearn18 this week. She will be sharing the project's results with academics from around the world during the Special Education session.
Last week the winners of the Chairman's Awards for Advancements in Accessibility (AAA) were recognized at an awards ceremony in Arlington, VA. The 4 winners are all very exciting technologies that benefit people with vision impairment, hearing impairment, cognitive disabilities and even for those learning English as a Second Language. Let's take a look at this year's winners.
This week is the 3rd Annual Conference of the National Coalition for Latinxs with Disabilities (CNLD by its acronym in Spanish). "The purpose of the annual conference is to build community, share our stories with one another, and provide updates on activism, policy and research at the intersection of Disability and Latinidad."
Today is the 7th Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and Dicapta is joining this awareness day by launching a campaign to inform Spanish-speaking children who are deaf, blind, deaf-blind or have some degree of hearing and vision impairment, and their parents, about the availability of audio description and closed caption services in Spanish and how they can access them.
There has been talk about audio description certification for a while. The American Council of the Blind (ACB) has taken the lead and started working with the Academy for Certification of Vision Rehabilitation & Education Professionals (ACVREP) toward accomplishing that.
