American Council of the Blind

Sunday, February 24, 2013
2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

 
2:00 - 2:30 p.m. Opening remarks and introduction of attendees
Mitch Pomerantz, President, American Council of the Blind (ACB)
 
2:30 - 3:15 p.m. Update on the Access Board’s Involvement in Hot-Button Issues in the Blind Community
David Capozzi, Executive Director, U.S. Access Board
 
3:15 - 3:30 p.m. Break
 
3:30 - 4:00 p.m. The Future of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)
David Morrissey, Executive Director, U.S. International Council on Disabilities (USICD)
Read more
 

Kareem Dale and Ellie Schafer
January 24, 2013
12:42 PM EST
 
President Obama and the First Lady have long been committed to ensuring that the White House is truly the People’s House, and that Americans with disabilities are fully integrated into our society. Today, continuing on that commitment, the White House Visitor’s Office is pleased to announce the availability of an audio description for those taking a White House tour. This will give blind and visually impaired Americans and persons with other print disabilities the opportunity to listen to an audio described tour as they visit the historic, public rooms of the White House.

The audio tour features welcoming remarks from Mrs. Obama followed by a room-by-room audio description of the highlights and features of the White House. This is just the latest step in the Obamas’ work to make the White House more open and accessible -   Read more here

Update on the first meeting of the Working Group on Accessible Prescription Drug Labels

On Thursday and Friday, January 10th and 11th, the Working Group on Accessible Prescription Drug Labels met at the U.S. Access Board headquarters in Washington, D.C. I was pleased to represent the American Council of the Blind and participated alongside individuals representing the Council of Citizens with Low Vision International, the Blinded Veterans Association, the National Federation of the Blind, and the American Foundation for the Blind in beginning the process of developing "best practices for providing drug label and other critical information to blind, visually impaired, deaf-blind and seniors". We were joined in this effort by individuals from several major pharmacy chains, industry representatives and those speaking on behalf of other disabilities and the senior community.

Congress has given the Working Group until July to finalize our recommendations and it is expected that one or more meetings to fine-tune the group's recommendations will take place. To learn what ACB has already suggested, please see our Statement on Best Practices for Prescription Drug Labeling.

Paul Edwards: Chair
Board of Publications
 
The Board of Publications is going to change the face of ACB, we think! I am excited to be writing this article and excited about what it contains. To understand what we propose, I need to go back into history a little. As ACB has found itself facing tough budget decisions, the ACB Braille Forum has, at various times, had to take it on the chin and produce fewer issues. This is largely because of the relatively high cost of making our magazine available to you. Up until four years ago, the Forum represented about fifteen percent of ACB's budget. When an issue or two got dropped, ACB saved a lot of money. The other thing that folks need to know is that the size of the magazine  has decreased as well. During 2012, ACB produced ten issues. Nine of them were 32 pages of large print and one was 48 pages of large print. This got us 336 pages of ACB Braille Forum. Because we have seriously purged our subscription list, the publication cost about $70,000.
 
The Budget Committee informed us that we were going to lose an issue this year because ACB will be operating with a deficit budget this year and there just was not enough money to publish the Forum with ten issues.
 
Some of us did some number crunching and discovered that the difference between the cost of our 32 page issue and our 48 page issue was not very large. So we decided to propose a radical alteration to the ACB Braille Forum. We will be producing six issues of the Forum this year, not the nine we were offered by the ACB Budget Committee and Board. However, each of the issues will be 56 pages long which will allow us to publish more longer articles than we could with such a small footprint as the one with which we operated. That will actually mean that we will be producing exactly the same number of pages as we did last year but for considerably less money.
 
I think that decision by itself would have been a good one. However, that is not where we propose to stop. We will be producing the new and enlarged ACB Braille Forum every other month but will be producing a second magazine that will appear in the month that the ACB Braille Forum does not. Read more here

The American Council of the Blind (ACB) annually awards approximately twenty scholarships ranging in amounts from $1,000 to $3,000 to vocational, entering freshmen, undergraduate, graduate and full time employees (32 hours or more per week who are attending college part time) students who are legally blind, maintain a 3.3 GPA and are involved in their school/local community.  Applications and all supporting materials must be received by 11:59 pm Central Standard Time on March 1, 2013. 
 
To read the scholarship guidelines and complete an on-line application, please visit: 
www.acb.org/scholarship
 
For more information, please contact the ACB National Office at: (202) 467-5081 or (800) 424-8666.  We look forward to receiving your application materials!

Before the
Federal Communications Commission
Washington, DC 20554
In the Matter of                                                                        )
                                                                                                )
Accessible Emergency Information, and                                ) MB Docket No. 12-107
Apparatus Requirements for Emergency Information and      )
Video Description:  Implementation of the Twenty-First           )
Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010)
 

Comments of the American Council of the Blind

Introduction

Introduction The American Council of the Blind (ACB) is pleased to submit these comments on the Federal Communications Commission’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) regarding video description apparatus and access to emergency information. Gathered for the purpose of advising the Commission on the implementation of the 21st Century Communication’s and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA), an advisory committee submitted three reports in April 2012: 1) on the availability of video described content; 2) on access to emergency information to blind and visually impaired people; and 3) on accessibility to user interfaces, program guides, and navigation devices. The Federal Communications Commission proposes the first set of rules based on the Advisory Committee’s reports.

Read more at Comments to FCC on VPAAC Report