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Posts Tagged ‘research’

The Librarian: Flex Watches

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

Flex WatchesFlex Watches creative and appealing approach to raise awareness toward people with disabilities deserves recognition. We were introduced to the Flex Watches campaign during a commercial break of MTV’s ‘Beavis and Butthead’ TV Show. In an appealing and mainstream manner, the commercial highlights the core message of the product: 10 colors | 10 charities | 10 percent. When exploring Flex Watches Website, we were more than thrilled to learn that the white watch represents Life Rolls On Foundation.

“Life Rolls On Foundation is dedicated to assisting and inspiring young people affected by spinal cord injury and uses action sports as a platform to demonstrate infinite possibilities despite paralysis. Its signature program, They Will Surf Again, empowers paraplegics and quadriplegics to surf with the assistance of adaptive equipment and dedicated volunteers. In addition to providing unique quality of life programs, Life Rolls On fosters spinal cord injury awareness and offers outreach to individuals and their families at the onset of injury.”

Watch the commercial below to learn how Flex Watches is successfully reaching their goal “to raise awareness for the 10 charities”.

Flex Watches from Flex Watches on Vimeo.

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Disability in the Media: Issues for an Equitable Workplace

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

movie theater

As a number of nations prepare for legislation and public action on disability rights in the wake of the UN Convention, a range of issues that impact popular perceptions of disability in the workplace need examination. The discussion of disability on film is not new. There are several books written on various aspects of the subject, and disability studies programs offer classes that run entire semesters on media issues. Though much progress has been made on subjects such as the relationship of screen depictions with the dominant models of thinking about disability in the western world, comparatively less has been written about the portrayal of disability in cinema in the rest of the world.

The canonical western cinema has followed a few dominant patterns regarding the portrayal of people with disabilities. Characters could typically be pitiable (Coming Home), burdensome (Whose life is it anyway?), sinister (Dr. Strangelove), or unable to live a successful integrated life (Gattaca). The fundamental underlying theme has been the disabled character’s maladjustment or incompatibility in the public sphere, effectively highlighting what we can be referred to as an “otherness” from the non-disabled population.

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Choices of Communication for People with Hearing Loss in Developing Countries

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

assistive listening devices symbol
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are 278 million people with hearing loss in the world and 80% of them live in low and middle income countries. The vast majority of the latter have never attended school, are illiterate and unemployed. There is a growing awareness and discussion about the potential socioeconomic benefits of assistive and accessible information and communication technologies, but it has yet to be seen if this momentum is rooted in the expressed needs and wants of the diverse communities of people with hearing loss.

The primary focus within the international development community is prevention, early identification (i.e. universal newborn screening), and treatment through the provision of hearing aids and related rehabilitation services. This is sensible given that 1) 50% or hearing impairment cases are preventable and greatly linked to conditions of poverty; and 2) at least 90% of people with hearing impairments would benefit from hearing aids yet fewer than 1 in 40 people have access to them (WHO).

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Part II: Assistive Technology and Accessibility Research in the Developing World

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Establishing AT research in the developing world is not going to be trivial, especially given the overall lack of existing scientific research capacity. Building this capacity must be based on a significant long-term investment and a commitment from the state and higher educational institutions to reward research both academically and commercially.

AT and Accessibility represent a massive breadth of work – building expertise in speech synthesizers for new languages requires a very different skill-set from building automated wheelchairs of currency readers. The most successful AT research centers have typically had connections with university, and thereby tapped into faculty with a range of interests. These have also bridged the connection between academia and industry, but from a funding perspective have almost always been kickstarted by the state. State commitments of inclusion to their vision-impaired populations cannot be realized without an investment in building an indigenous and inclusive research culture.

In an ideal case scenario, this would mean building a scenario where people can think of research as a career – from graduate studies onward either towards academic careers or industrial research positions. Given that the larger goals of building scientific research can be anything between very challenging to completely infeasible for a number of smaller countries, for the purposes of AT research there are three short-term possibilities.

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