"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much."

Hellen Keller

"The real problem of blindness is not the lack of eyesight. The real problem is the misunderstanding and lack of information that exists. If a blind person has proper training and opportunity, blindness is only a physical nuisance.

NFB

Latest News

Apple Distinguished Educators, Summer Institute 2010

I was fortunate to be invited to the 2010 Apple Distinguished Educators Summer Institute held July 11-16 at Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida. Throughout the week of this institute, I worked with a group of four talented educators who are dedicated to using Apple technologies to improve the lives of students with special needs. For our final project, we created a wiki where we hope to collect testimonials of the impact of Apple technologies on the lives of these students. I am proud to report that our videos were the only ones that were closed captioned, a testament to our commitment to accessibility. I captioned the videos using MovCaptioner, a program for captioning QuickTime movies on the Mac.. If you would like to contribute your own story, please visit our wiki.

CSUN Presentation

I did two presentations at the 25th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference (CSUN) held March 22-27th in San Diego California. My first presentation was a 3-hour workshop entitled "The iPod Touch in the Special Needs Classroom." Along with fellow Apple Distinguished Educators Mark Coppin and Mark Dohn, I demonstrated the built-in accessibility features of the iPhone/iPod touch (the iPad had not been announced yet), as well as apps that can benefit students with disabilities. The second presentation was a 1-hr session on the accessibility features of Mac OS X.

Extension Webinars

This past winter, I presented two webinars for eXtension, a national initiative that provides online professional development for faculty and staff at land grant universities. On December 17th, 2009, I presented "An Introduction to Web Accessibility." The goal of that session was to provide an overview of the benefits of web accessibility (the "why"). On January 12, 2010 I did a follow up session entitled "Web Accessibility Techniques" where I demonstrated several free tools for checking the accessibility of any website. The webinars are archived at the eXtension Professional Development wiki.

2009 Accessi-BULL

Accessi-BULL is a yearly event held at the University of South Florida to raise awareness about disability issues on campus. For Accessi-BULL 2009 I presented a 20 minute "Introduction to Web Accessibility" focusing on five easy tips for making a website accessible. My slides for this presentation are available on Slideshare.

 

National Council for Geography Education

I did back to back presentations on podcasting for geography education at the 2009 conference of the National Council for Geography Education. In addition to the beautiful setting for the conference (San Juan, Puerto Rico), I enjoyed having an opportunity to present technical content in Spanish. My other presentation at this conference focused on GeoRSS and its application to the teaching of geography.