10/23/2012: Making Your Organization Accessible to People With Disabilities
- Start:
- October 23, 2012 3:00 pm
- End:
- October 23, 2012 4:00 pm
- Cost:
- FREE
- Category:
View This Session’s Archive Here
One out of five people live with some type of a disability. If the environment or information is not sufficiently designed, people with disabilities are not able to participate in the life of an organization.
In this presentation we are going to look at the needs of people with disabilities (sight, hearing, extremities), how can we make a difference in their lives, and how this effort benefits everyone.
The following topics will be covered:
- Physical accessibility
- Accessibility of information
- Extending services to all
- Legislation and the right things to do
- How do people with disabilities access services and information?
- How helping to involve others can benefit you
Takeaways:
- Master the right language for:
- What is accessibility and why is it important?
- Correcting misconceptions: An organization can do a lot with minimal time and cost investment to make activities accessible
- Tools and software that make people’s lives easier
- Mainstream tools and specialized solutions
 Tom Babinszki: I was born totally blind in Hungary. Opportunities were much more limited those days, but it didn’t take long to turn my situation into a vocation. I wanted to help make more opportunities available to people with disabilities.
I started to work with advocacy groups when I was a teenager, and later on the national level to make higher education accessible to people with disabilities. After college I moved to the United States where I started working as an accessibility consultant and later started my own company. While working with thousands of people in the United States, I worked with developing countries. One of my biggest achievements was training a group of blind people in Southeast Asia to become the first accessibility experts in their own countries. Currently I’m building a business program at the Hadley School for the Blind to help blind entrepreneurs to realize their dream of independence. |
 Even Grounds was started in 2007 to help organizations make information accessible to people with disabilities. We have worked with government agencies, corporations and non-profits to help them include people with disabilities into their organizational activities. We have trained thousands of government employees and contractors on creating accessible web sites, and helped web designers to ensure web accessibility. |
