AFB Blog

Friday May 27th 2016, President Barack Obama will be the first sitting President of the United States to set foot in Hiroshima since the atomic bomb devastated that city 71 years ago Wednesday October 13th 1948, Helen Keller was America’s First Goodwill Ambassador to Japan after the Second World War Helen wrote the following letter to her good friend Nella Braddy Henney on a train from Hiroshima to Fukuoka on October 14th, 1948, the day after her visit to the devastated city. The letter…

May 19 marks the fifth celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day—a day designed to “get people talking, thinking and learning about digital (web, software, mobile, etc.) accessibility and users with different disabilities.” This year has seen some exciting developments in accessibility. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Comcast, and Google have all announced major initiatives. There have been setbacks, as well. Nearly six years after the Obama Administration publicly promised to make…

AFB’s Communications team sat down with Kirk to ask him a few questions about his new role, his vision for the future, and his hobbies. Here’s what he had to say. Tell us about your new role at AFB. What are you looking forward to? I am honored to be the American Foundation for the Blind’s (AFB) new president and CEO. I’ve long admired AFB’s commitment to making the world a more equitable, inclusive place for people with vision loss. So I’m excited to build upon AFB’s impressive history and…

Helen Keller was always a vocal supporter for the rights of children. In 1923, she wrote a fundraising letter on behalf of the National Playground and Recreation Association of America. In it she passionately advocated for the need for outdoor spaces where children could run around safely and enjoy themselves. Keller instinctively understood that play is as important to the healthy development of a child as is study indoors. Read her words below — they are as applicable today as when she…

Crista Earl, AFB's Director of Web Operations, and I were excited to attend the Web For All (W4A) Conference this year, in Montreal, Canada to share information about the AFB Accessible Video Player. Web accessibility is an important part of our work at the American Foundation for the Blind. We are committed to making our website and all of our products—from apps to online courses and webinars to books—fully accessible to people with vision loss. The theme for this year’s conference was “…

On the heels of major accessibility announcements from Twitter and Facebook, tech giant Google recently highlighted its own efforts to build a more inclusive world for people with disabilities. Here are four ways Google is working to improve the lives of people who are blind or visually impaired: Gaining equal access to information—As part of the Google Impact Challenge the company recently awarded $20 million in grants to 29 grantees around the world. One of the grantees, the DAISY…

Dear Annie, Happy birthday! Today, we celebrate your legacy and excellence as an educator. You insisted that your student, Helen Keller, could learn and accomplish just as much as any seeing and hearing child could — and you were right. You were a tough teacher — when Helen misspelled a word in an essay or letter, you made her rewrite the entire text — but you also had a finely tuned insight into a child’s psychology. You instantly recognized that Helen was a very bright child who just…

The American Foundation for the Blind needs your help! This week, we are asking all of you to support the Cogswell-Macy Act, the most comprehensive special education legislation for students with sensory disabilities to date. Call in on April 14th to ensure key resources are available to these students and their parents and educators through and expansion of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).  Parents and teachers around the country are rallying around this bill…

Today, Facebook announced a new feature, "automatic alternative text": Using Artificial Intelligence to Help Blind People ‘See’ Facebook. The feature takes advantage of Facebook's object recognition technology to offer people using VoiceOver on iPhones or iPads a description of their friends' photos. The descriptions are coded as alt text, a standard HTML attribute that allows web designers to provide text alternatives for images. "This step toward automatically describing photos helps those…