Accessible Technology

The annual Training Conference and Expo (TCE), sponsored by National Industries for the Blind (NIB) and the National Association for the Employment of People Who Are Blind (NAEPB), is less than a week away! During TCE, NIB will host AccessTech, a smart office and accessible technology showcase that will be open to the public. Highlights […]

October is designated especially as National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM), which celebrates people with disabilities and the contributions they make in the workplace. For 2024, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy selected “Access to Good Jobs for All” as the theme. For National Industries for the Blind (NIB), every day is […]

The NIB/NAEPB annual Training Conference and Expo (TCE), scheduled for October 14-18 in the nation’s capital, will offer a variety of exciting programming designed to empower employment for people who are blind. We will also recognize the 2024 Employees of the Year, representing NIB associated nonprofit agencies from across the country! To register for TCE, […]

Let’s face it: When the artificial intelligence research project OpenAI announced the public release of ChatGPT in 2023, no one expected the quirky chatbot to dominate world headlines for weeks to come. What is ChatGPT? Using large language modeling (LLM), OpenAI researchers fed a dataset of an estimated 175 billion words of text into ChatGPT, […]

When David Epstein moved to Sedona, Arizona, several years ago, he looked forward to regular hikes with his wife through the picturesque red sandstone formations along the outskirts of the popular tourist destination. Epstein, who has the incurable inherited retinal eye disease retinitis pigmentosa, soon found hiking with his wife increasingly difficult — especially at […]

Each January, people across the globe celebrate Louis Braille’s genius communication system of tactile raised dots representing visual alpha-numeric print. January is National Braille Literacy Month, and January 4 is World Braille Day.  Born in France on January 4, 1809, Louis Braille fell victim to a tragic accident in his father’s leather-harness-making shop as a […]

Thanks to today’s digital revolution, there is no shortage of new technologies available for people with visual or hearing impairments. But for the estimated 7 million people in the world who have both visual and hearing impairments (according to World Health Organization data), assistive technology options are few and far between. When I learned of […]

As the labor market remains strong, employers looking to retain valued employees are renewing efforts to provide workplace accommodations. A recent study from the Job Accommodation Network (JAN) offers good news – a majority of workplace accommodations cost less than $500 to implement, with nearly half having no cost at all. From January 1, 2019, […]

On March 9, 2020, Orcam, the Israeli assistive hardware maker that developed the powerful wearable Orcam MyEye, announced the release of Orcam Read, a hand-held alternative for scanning and reading text from nearly any surface.  Launching Orcam Read seven days before the U.S. went into lockdown for COVID-19 was unfortunate, but the reading pen is […]

In the fall 2017 issue of Opportunity I reviewed the breakthrough real-time service offered by Aira Tech, a San Diego venture startup that aims to make life easier for people who are blind. The Aira service pairs users who are blind or visually impaired with vetted, trained “visual interpreters” who are on call 24 hours […]