Eyes on the Prize: The Hadley School for the Blind Wants to Back Your Business

The Hadley School for the Blind's Forsythe Center for Employment and Entrepreneurship (FCE) was launched in 2011 to address the 70 to 80 percent unemployment and underemployment rate among Americans who are blind or visually impaired. Through this business education program, Hadley offers tuition-free courses to help prepare students for employment and entrepreneurship. Now, Hadley is announcing its inaugural 2016 New Venture Business Competition.

In the spirit of ABC's hit show, "Shark Tank," Hadley is inviting new, current, or recent Forsythe Center students to submit their plans for a start up for a chance to win one of three cash awards for up to $10,000. Entrants must have enrolled in at least one FCE module for consideration of their business plan. However, it's not too late to become an FCE student and participate in the competition. New FCE students must provide proof of legal blindness from a physician before enrolling in an FCE course. Participation and submission rules can be found on the New Venture Business Competition website. To enroll in the FCE, please visit the Hadley website or call Student Services at 800-526-9909.

Contestants will need to move quickly, though, as the entry period ends when the clock strikes 11:59 pm CST on Feb. 15, 2016. Winners will be recognized and receive their awards at the 2016 Business Leadership and Superior Training (BLAST) Conference in Chicago, May 17–20, 2016.

Help improve SiteCues!

Help improve SiteCues by taking a quick survey. Your input is essential to make the web more usable for people with diverse abilities. By offering your feedback, you will help SiteCues align development priorities for 2016.

Senators Urge Obama Administration to Release Proposed Rules for Internet Access Under the Americans with Disabilities Act

Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) led a group of eight other Senators in a letter to the Obama administration calling for the prompt release of rules that would clarify and support access to information and communications technology (ICT) under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Unfortunately, because the ADA predated the information-technology revolution, the statute and its implementing regulations lack sufficient clarity on the question of ICT accessibility. This ambiguity has resulted in individuals with disabilities facing frequent and unacceptable barriers to Internet access and information and communications technology.

Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Cory A. Booker (D-N.J.), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) also signed the letter to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

A copy of the letter to OMB can be found here. A digitally accessible version can be found here.

2015 Accessibility Year in Review — A Message from the Facebook Accessibility Team

What a year 2015's been! Here are a few highlights, stories and reflections from the world of Facebook Accessibility in 2015. We are grateful for the support and love we have received from all of you and promise to keep advancing the accessibility of Facebook's products. Facebook's goal is to connect the world, and that means everyone.

Growing the Team

While accessibility is an aspect of code quality owned by every engineer at Facebook, it's critical to have a central team enabling this ownership. Meet the people that recently joined Facebook's Accessibility engineering team this year.

Spotlight on our Community

Building accessible products enables people to use Facebook in empowering ways. Here are two stories we published this past year that capture this:

Raising Awareness

We organized a number of accessibility awareness events:

Making Accessibility Mainstream

One of our main goals is to help push accessibility into the mainstream of technology. Here are a few ways we did that the past year:

  • We launched our Accessibility Toolkit, a blueprint for scaling accessibility within our company and larger engineering organizations.
  • The Teaching Accessibility initiative launched the week of the ADA's 25th celebration. We partnered with our peers in tech, academia and advocacy to help improve awareness and knowledge of accessibility across design, engineering and HCI.
  • We released our accessibility best practices training tutorial called HIKE! This is one of the tools that we've built in-house to teach web developers basics on accessibility, and now it's available for anyone in the world.
  • We announced the React Native Accessibility API, which allows web developers building apps on iOS and Android with React to make their experiences more accessible to people who use assistive technology. Learn more about how to use the API.
Recognition of our work
Building a Culture that cares about Empathy and Accessibility

We continue to focus on building awareness about accessibility internally and creating an accessible campus for employees and visitors.

Product Improvements

Here are just a few of this year's many product improvements and launches around accessibility. You can check out our monthly updates for details on all of the changes and improvements for accessibility across platforms.

Thank you and a happy new year to all of you!

Article Topic
AccessWorld News