From April 18-20, AFB hosted its annual flagship conference (formerly titled the Josephine L. Taylor Leadership Institute), together with Illinois AER, in Chicago. With over two dozen exhibitors and more than 400 attendees, we made many new friends and reconnected with old ones.
There are just a couple of other items I want to share from CES. I did get a chance to play with the Fleksy keypad from Syntellia. As many know, this is an app for Android and iOS that allows text input using a touchscreen keyboard using the relative position of your finger touches to mimic the qwerty keyboard. In other words, you start typing where you think the letters are, and Fleksy fills in what it thinks you're typing. It works quite well and I found the learning curve to be very short. I can see why so many users are finding this popular.
Day 2 at CES featured some TV, some audio, some speech and a nice little company making nifty headphones.
OK, so I sort of surrender to the TV juggernaut that is CES with a visit to Panasonic. But, this is a blindness access story and not a (super high-def, screen as large as my garage story).
After taking in a couple of sessions focusing on tech and seniors, William Reuschel and I tackled the exhibit floor (the lifeblood of CES).
The American Foundation for the Blind is prepped and ready to head to the 2012 Association for the Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind or Visually Impaired (AER) International Conference in Bellevue, Washington. We are "rolling deep" to the conference, prepped to present, attend, and show off our amazing exhibit!
...And maybe add "A Few Fruity Drinks!" to that title. I am just getting back in the swing of things after a great AFB Leadership Conference with Florida AER in St. Pete Beach, FL. I can tell you that it was hard to get back behind my desk after returning from our beautiful location at the Tradewinds Island Resort. I would prefer to set up my desk on the white sand beach with the clear blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico in front of me.
