Pennsylvania Rehabilitation Council
1902 Market Street Camp Hill, PA 17011
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email: racucpca@parac.org
This week's edition by Linda and Jill. All links have been verified as of June July 9. Please credit the PaRC Support Project for any information forwarded to others. Thank you.
PENNSYLVANIA REHABILITATION COUNCIL
Mission Statement
The mission of the Council is, after consultation with the State Workforce Investment Board, to inform and advise the State Board of Vocational Rehabilitation and the Governor on the diverse issues affecting vocational rehabilitation.
Note: Some of the information found in this update, you may have already received from another source. This update is for informational purposes only. The Pennsylvania Rehabilitation Council (PaRC) and the staff are not responsible for the accuracy of this information. The update is not used as a vehicle to express the views and positions of the Pennsylvania Rehabilitation Council or the Support Staff.
Please note meetings are from 9:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. at the Harrisburg Hilton. Please plan to stay for the entire meeting.
PaRC Committee Conference Calls - Please mark your calendars
The Disability Agenda Committee would like to extend an invitation to all PaRC members to join the committee. The Disability Agenda Committee is down to two members. If anyone is interested please contact the office. All members are required to serve on at least one committee.
For a complete listing of OVR Stakeholder Meetings for 2008 click on OVR Stakeholder Meetings for 2008.
The meeting schedule for 2008 has been updated.
A professor turns cellphones into aids for the disabled
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Three years ago, in the depths of a Pittsburgh winter, Priya Narasimhan saw a blind man trying to catch a bus.
Stepping in and out of pools of slush, the man called out to passing pedestrians to ask if a vehicle he heard arriving was his ride home. Buses passed by. "We can do better than that," Ms. Narasimhan said to herself.
Ms. Narasimhan, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, soon became the hub for student research projects that develop technologies to assist the disabled by doing such tasks as identifying buses or translating sign language into spoken words. Their creations turn the most ubiquitous device on a college campus - the cellphone - into an independence-enhancing machine.
Some of these endeavors are now being spun off into a small company. Ms. Narasimhan's and her students' accomplishments have come after countless hours of work, some for credit but much uncredited, and almost always not financed save for a small grant cadged from the university.
Shortly after the bus incident, Ms. Narasimhan began kicking around ideas about ways to make blind people's lives easier using technology. Her main priorities were convenience and affordability, so her first inclination was to upgrade something many blind people already use: canes. Perhaps, she thought, she could create a cane that would give audio clues to the surrounding environment.
In the process, she began consulting with Dan Rossi, a systems administrator at Carnegie Mellon who has been blind since childhood. Mr. Rossi has strong views about what kinds of technologies can help blind people. He told Ms. Narasimhan flatly that upgrading the cane, as other inventors have tried to do, was a terrible idea.
"A cane is a cheap tool," he said. "You know, it's 20 bucks. You can break them, you can throw them away, you can get them wet, and they don't have to be recharged. It's like a pencil. You really don't want to soup up a pencil."
Casting canes aside, the budding engineers starting looking at cellphones, which can be bought already outfitted with text-to-speech software and which many disabled people also already use. So far Ms. Narasimhan has advised three student projects that adapt cellphones for use by the blind, and one for use by the deaf. The first adaptation helps solve the problem faced by the blind man waiting for the bus. Her students' software program allows users to retrieve scheduled bus routes on their smart phones from the transit system's Web site. The schedules are then read aloud by the phone.
But buses tend to be off-schedule, so Ms. Narasimhan said she is also lobbying the local transit authority to give her access to buses' GPS locations. That way a blind person can know for certain if the vehicle he hears approaching is the one he needs to board.
The second project assists blind people in shopping for groceries or other goods by connecting a tiny bar-code reader to a cellphone, which retrieves product names from a free Universal Product Code database that is already available on the Internet. This way, Mr. Rossi said, he doesn't need a sighted person to help him determine if the cookie box he is holding is oatmeal raisin or chocolate chip. Ms. Narasimhan is hoping to build a new version of the public UPC database that will include nutritional information, pricing, and other details that a visually impaired shopper might want to know.
Devices already exist that allow people to create custom-made bar-codes, which could be added to the new database so that blind users could label and then identify objects at home or at work.
The last vision-related project Ms. Narasimhan and her students have been working on may receive more attention thanks to a major lawsuit.
In May a U.S. appeals court ruled that the U.S. Treasury must change U.S. paper currency to make bills accessible to the blind. Unlike paper currency from most other countries, U.S. bills of different denominations are the same size and have the same texture. Blind people thus must ask sighted people to identify the bills they are given, and then usually rely on folding or organizing tricks to remember which bills are which.
Ms. Narasimhan's students have provided an alternative. They have populated a database with images of bills, crisp and crumpled, well lit and shadowed. With special software, a blind person can take a picture of a bill using a cellphone camera. The software will transmit the picture to the database and name the bill based on an image match.
There are already text-reading currency identifiers that can also read words from a variety of other sources. A blind person using these products must zoom in directly on the word "FIVE" or number "5," though, rather than any other part of the bill. Image matching, with the Carnegie Mellon system, does not have this limitation, though it has the disadvantage of not being able to identify unknown text such as that on menus.
Mr. Rossi and Ms. Narasimhan said that for years they have been trying to get the ear of the Treasury Department - the defendant in the currency accessibility suit - about this project.
"My point to them was 'You guys can either spend a whole lot of money modifying your currency or you could just buy a bunch of cellphones and give them away,'" Mr. Rossi said.
He said department officials have always wished him well but are reluctant to support any particular company.
So far Ms. Narasimhan has been financing most of the research out of her own pocket, though she recently secured a grant from the university for $50,000. She is trying to figure out how to get the prototypes off the ground, bundling them into a spinoff company called BeaconSys. When talking to potential financers, she and Mr. Rossi emphasize ways that this software created to help blind people could be useful to sighted customers - for example, the bus-schedule software would be helpful to anyone using public transportation - thereby expanding the market and bringing down prices.
"I don't know what our exact price point will be, but it will be in the tens of dollars," rather than the hundreds or even thousands of dollars that specialized devices for the blind like currency readers and bar-code scanners currently sell for, Mr. Rossi said.
Major national blind organizations have also shown interest, though Mr. Rossi says he is wary of aligning the projects too closely with either group.
"The two main organizations, the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind, are kind of along the lines of Democrats and Republicans. They hate each other, and if one says one thing, the other is against it," he said, noting that the NFB has sharply criticized the AFB's lawsuit against the Treasury. "We're not getting into bed with anybody just yet."
While trying to secure backing for the technology projects for the blind, Ms. Narasimhan has also been advising a nascent project that uses text-to-speech software on cellphones to assist the deaf. This project involves a gesture-recognition glove that can translate hand movements, such as American Sign Language, into spoken words. When a deaf person wearing the glove makes a sign, sensors in the glove translate each hand position into words that are then read aloud by the cellphone's text-to-speech software. That way, the deaf person can communicate with a hearing person who doesn't know ASL.
This project is still in the early stages and right now can translate only a few test gestures - a thumbs-up sign triggers the phrase "Go, Pens!," for example, in honor of the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Despite the financial straits Ms. Narasimhan's students say they are in, and the fact that they are no longer receiving course credit for this work, they devote many late nights and weekends to the assistive-technology projects.
"I spend a little more time on this stuff than I should be, at least if I want to graduate anytime soon," said Patrick E. Lanigan, a graduate student who has been working on the technologies for the blind. But, he and his colleagues say, in this kind of work, they are motivated by more than the desire to obtain a degree, and have learned to get a lot of work done even when resources are scarce.
"This has mostly been a soup-kitchen kind of project," says Ms. Narasimhan.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 54, Issue 42, Page A13
A new assistive technology allows individuals with disabilities to operate a computer, control a powered wheelchair and interact with ... > full story
Online Service Lets Blind Surf The Internet From Any Computer, Anywhere New software lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Internet on the go. The computer science student who created the software, ... > full story
Information Bulletin # 253 (7/08).
In Information Bulletin #250, entitled "Good-Bye Full Accessibility," I summarized the U.S. Department of Justice's June 17, 2008 Proposed Rulemaking which propose significant amendments to Titles II and III's federal regulations and which will profoundly affect access to public facilities and to public accommodations and commercial facilities.
On June 30, 2008, DOJ announced a public hearing on these proposed amendments and scheduled the hearing for July 15, 2008 at the Marriot Hotel, 775 12th Street, NW, Washington, D.C. If you wish to present comments at the hearing, you are "encouraged to register in advance."
Telephone 800-514-0301 (voice) and 800-514-9383 (TTY) by July 7, 2008. "Comments will be limited to five minutes per person or organization, but commenters who wish to may supplement their testimony with written statements."
Our basic problem is with the proposed regulations are that the "safe harbor" provisions will significantly limit accessibility in public facilities (e.g., playgrounds, swimming pools, buildings) and public accommodations (e.g., stores). We will not review the specifics already outlined in Bulletin #250.
Some people pointed out that even without the "safe harbor" provisions, many stores and other public accommodations had not, sixteen years after the ADA federal regulations were initially promulgated in 1992, removed "readily achievable barriers" and had not made their facilities accessible. These accommodations had tax deductions and tax credits available, and still did not make their facilities accessible. With the proposed rules, DOJ provides added excuses for not making facilities fully accessible.
Even though DOJ has not provided a lot of time either to plan to come to DC or to testify, we think DOJ should hear about your efforts to implement accessibility and the excuses/successes provided in the past under the existing regulations. For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer on 6/25/08 quoted Liberty Resources' Executive Director Thomas Earle who had identified 42 businesses with a single step barrier. Despite Liberty writing letters to the owners of inaccessible restaurants, e.g., to the Snow White Restaurant and to Pandora's Lunch Box, owners neither responded or wrote back, nor made their facilities accessible.
So the bottom line, why would DOJ propose regulatory amendments that will reduce accessibility? Who are the forces behind these proposals? Why did not DOJ propose to strengthen the existing regulations to improve accessibility?
We thought the ADA was supposed to "eventually" result in a barrier free country. Silly us.
Power concedes nothing without a struggle!
Steve Gold, The Disability Odyssey continues
Back issues of other Information Bulletins are available online at http://www.stevegoldada.com with a searchable Archive at this site divided into different subjects.
To contact Steve Gold directly, write to stevegoldada@cs.com or call 215-627-7100.
Dateline: July 4, 2008
On July 4, Governor Ed Rendell signed the FY 2008-2009 state budget into law shortly after the House approved the measure by 170-32 and the Senate by 49-1. The $28.2 billion budget raises overall spending by about 3.8 percent while appropriating more funds for schools, energy initiatives and infrastructure. Overall spending is up 3.8 percent, but a number of state programs received cuts. The basic education subsidy is an exception, receiving a substantial 5.5 percent boost. The budget provides for a $633 million increase, or 6.6 percent, for the PA Department of Public Welfare (DPW). The DPW budget includes a 1% cost of living adjustment for home and community based services, including mental health, mental retardation, and people with disabilities, including people served by MA waiver programs. In a public statement released after the signing of the budget, DPW said that "the 2008-09 budget provides a cost-of-living increase for many providers, including community mental health and mental retardation, community services for the elderly and persons with disability, and nursing homes. The goal of this increase is to help providers offset rising food, energy and other costs."
Governor Ed Rendell said that the budget will enable Pennsylvania to provide health care coverage for 186,000 children -- an enrollment increase of nearly 11 percent over 2007-08. Additionally, the spending plan will help expand child care services to 2,600 more children and provide assistance to 77,665 developmentally delayed children. The budget increases reimbursement rates by $21.7 million ($10.2 million state funds) for Medical Assistance services, provides for an increase in autism services to adults from the current $23.4 million to $46.4 million in state and federal funds, serves an additional 2,930 children with physical and developmental disabilities with early intervention services, and serves an additional 2,100 older Pennsylvanians and an additional 1,300 people with disabilities by expanding the availability of community services. A number of agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Community and Economic Development, the Department of State, and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, were cut. Graphics, budget highlights and additional details about the 2008-09 budgets are at www.budget.state.pa.us.
PARF will be hosting its 2008 Annual Conference at the Nittany Lion Inn in State College, PA from Tuesday, September 23 to Friday, September 26. This year's annual conference - Rehabilitation at Work: Leadership, Partnership and Improvement - features three keynote presentations that open each day's events, an annual meeting of PARF members, an awards luncheon and more than 40 conference sessions. The PARF 2008 Annual Conference brochure, including forms and details for registration is available by contact parfmail@parf.org. Special rates are available for early bird registration. Arrangements for lodging are made by contacting the Nittany Lion Inn at 1-800-233-7505. Special rates for lodging for conference participants are available until August 23, 2008. Directions to the Nittany Lion Inn can be found at www.pshs.psu.edu or may be obtained by calling the PARF office at (717) 657-7608. Information on discounted rates is also available through PARF. If more information or assistance is needed, please contact PARF at parfmail@parf.org.
HB 1150 - legislation requiring insurance coverage for the diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorders - has passed the House (203-0) on July 1 and Senate (49-1) on July 2 and will soon be signed into law. The autism insurance coverage bill (HB 1150) will give children under the age of 21 greater access to services and treatments. The new law will require that most health insurance policies, adult Basic, Medical Assistance, and CHIP offer coverage for autism spectrum disorder treatments. Coverage will be capped at $36,000 per year with no lifetime cap. The bill creates an expedited appeals process for denied claims to further protect children with autism and their families.
Once enacted into law, the autism provisions will go into effect immediately. The measure also contains a provision for insuring insurance coverage for colorectal cancer screening. That section goes into effect 60 days after the bill is signed. Governor Rendell is expected to sign the bill into law next week. FMI: For a copy of the bill, see www.legis.state.pa.us. See also www.autismspeaks.org. For a summary of the bill and comment on HB 1648, see bill summary
In support of the Governor's initiatives for improved results for all students, the PA Department of Education announced the availability of a special education performance grant for the 2008-09 school year for Transition from School to Community Based Employment for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The grant is designed to support evidence based practices that will improve the achievement of students with disabilities. Local education authorities are encouraged to review the funding opportunity and to apply. Specific information regarding the grant as well as the grant application can be accessed via the Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network (PaTTAN) website at www.pattan.net. An informational videoconference that explains this opportunity and reviews the application process will be held on Thursday July 10, 2008 from 9:00 am to 11:30 am at each of the PaTTAN offices as well as the following downlink sites: IU 1, IU 11, IU 18 (Luzerne), and IU 19 (Northeastern Educational). Registration is available on the PaTTAN website at www.pattan.net.
On June 16, the National Council on Disability (NCD) announced that it is soliciting public input for a study of emerging issues and trends affecting the lives of people with disabilities. Information gathered will be used in the development of NCD's next annual progress report, National Disability Policy: A Progress Report, which is required annually by Section 401 (b) of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended. NCD says that comments will help to provide a guide for America's programs and services to be modernized to reflect the changed and changing needs of people with disabilities in our communities. Information should be submitted to NCD by July 22, 2008.
The purpose of this public consultation is to gather input to inform NCD's assessment of the status of the nation in achieving policies that guarantee equal opportunity for all individuals with disabilities, and that empower individuals with disabilities to achieve economic self-sufficiency, independent living, and inclusion and integration into all aspects of society. The entire document and information on how to respond is available at view document.