Independence Empowerment Center, Inc. (IEC) is a community-based, non-profit, non-residential service and advocacy organization operated by and for people with disabilities in the state of Virginia. Our service area covers Prince William and Fauquier Counties, as well as the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park.
IEC is a fully registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization that was founded in 1999. IEC promotes disability rights, equal access, and full community participation for persons with disabilities. We work with individuals with disabilities to maintain or take back charge of their own lives and make their own choices and decisions in order to be as self-sufficient as possible. With our consumers' assistance, we lead efforts to break down barriers and prejudices within our communities. When these barriers are removed and prejudices are replaced with positive attitudes, persons with disabilities will have equal access to society. Independence Empowerment Center is associated with a national movement of almost 500 Centers for Independent Living. These Centers are advocacy-based organizations governed and operated by persons with disabilities for persons with disabilities.
Mark Your Calendars NOW to attend IEC’s
Annual ADA Fair at
Harris Pavilion, 9201 Center Street, Manassas, VA
Saturday, July 19th
10am - 2pm
Silent Auction Items Will Be Fantastic!
Items include…drum roll please!
Two Jumbo passes to the County Fair
SplashDown Tickets
A Weed Eater
Cat and Dog Items
Restaurant Certificates
etc.
etc.
Visions of future technology don’t involve being chained to a desktop machine. People move from home computers to work computers to mobile devices; public kiosks pop up in libraries, schools and hotels; and people increasingly store everything from e-mail to spreadsheets on the Web.
But for the roughly 10 million people in the United States who are blind or visually impaired, using a computer has, so far, required special screen-reading software typically installed only on their own machines.
New software, called WebAnywhere, launched today lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Web on the go. The tool developed at the University of Washington turns screen-reading into an Internet service that reads aloud Web text on any computer with speakers or headphone connections.
“This is for situations where someone who’s blind can’t use their own computer but still wants access to the Internet. At a museum, at a library, at a public kiosk, at a friend’s house, at the airport,” said Richard Ladner, a UW professor of computer science and engineering. The free program and both audio and video demonstrations are at http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu.
Ladner will demonstrate the tool next week in Dallas at the National Federation of the Blind’s annual convention. WebAnywhere was developed under Ladner’s supervision by Jeffrey Bigham, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Free screen readers already exist, as do sophisticated commercial programs. But all must be installed on a machine before being used. This is the first accessibility tool hosted on the Web, meaning it doesn’t have to be downloaded onto a computer. It processes the text on an external server and then sends the audio file to play in the user’s Web browser.
“You don’t have to install new software. So even if you go to a heavily locked-down computer, say at a library, you can still use it,” Bigham said.
In May, Bigham was named the winner of the Accessible Technology Award for Interface Design for the Imagine Cup, a student programming contest sponsored by Microsoft Corp. The prize comes with $8,000 and a trip to Paris in early July.
For the past month WebAnywhere has been available on request. Bigham said he’s received inquiries from librarians who would like to make all their machines accessible on a limited budget. He’s also had interest from teachers who struggle to find the time to locate free software, get permission to install it on a school computer and then maintain the program so that a single computer is accessible to a visually impaired student. This software would make any computer in the lab instantly accessible for Internet tasks. The Web-based service also eliminates the need for local technical support: there is no software to install or update because each time a person visits the site he or she gets the latest version.
To test the software, researchers had people use the tool to do three things typically done at public machines: check e-mail, look up a bus schedule and search for a restaurant’s phone number. People using WebAnywhere were able to successfully complete all three tasks, using a variety of machines and Internet connections.
Like other screen readers, WebAnywhere converts written text to an electronically generated voice. So far the system works only in English. But the source code was released a few weeks ago and a Web developer in China has expressed interest in developing a Chinese version.
The UW team plans to create updates that will allow users to change the speed at which the text is read aloud and add other popular features found in existing screen readers. The service is currently hosted on a server at the UW campus.
Bigham is also working with Benetech, a Palo Alto, Calif., technology nonprofit that supports the development of tools for the blind.
Bigham believes this could be the first of many Web-based accessibility tools.
“Traditional desktop tools such as e-mail, word processors and spreadsheets are moving to the Web,” he said. “Access technology, which currently runs only on the desktop, needs to follow suit.”
For more information, contact Bigham at (206) 271-6653 and jbigham@cs.washington.edu, or Ladner at (206) 543-9347 and ladner@cs.washington.edu.
For more information on WebAnywhere, see http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu
Mark Your Calendars NOW to attend IEC’s
Annual ADA Fair at
Harris Pavilion, 9201 Center Street, Manassas, VA
Saturday, July 19th
10am - 2pm
Silent Auction Items Will Be Fantastic!
Items include…drum roll please!
Two Jumbo passes to the County Fair
SplashDown Tickets
A Weed Eater
Cat and Dog Items
Restaurant Certificates
etc.
etc.
Please come and celebrate with us on July 19, 2008 as we observe the 18th anniversay of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)!
Some of last year’s community participants
Last summer, as a grant requirement, IEC had its first ADA Fair. This turned out to be a big event for our small non-profit organization and the community. Over 30 businesses came and set up exhibits to display
Come join us for our 2nd Annual ADA Fair on Saturday, July 19, 2008, from 10:00am to 2:00pm, at the Harris Pavilion in Manassas. Visitors and Vendors welcome. For more information, contact Stephanie George at 703-257-5400 (Voice/TTY) or sgeorge@ieccil.org.
