A church has built an accessibility ramp and perhaps refitted its restrooms to accommodate a wheelchair. Now what? This new resource by a noted author of several books on people with disabilities offers a theological and practical approach for congregations, with clear, targeted strategies for full inclusion of all members, recognizing and using the gifts that each member brings to the congregations life together.
The Social Contract -- Rousseau's famous term concerning the bond between a government and it's people -- has been sold to the highest bidder. Freedom is reserved only for markets in a society increasingly strangled by corporate of power.Empowerment is the new definition of destitution.By looking at the struggles of the disabled faced with the end of social services, Ending the Social Contract as We Know It provides a powerful warning: the disabled are as canaries in a coal mine, and their maltreatment is a harbinger of things to come for the rest of us.In a tightly woven argument, Marta Russell shows how the onslaught of corporate power facing the disabled -- from issues like genetic screening, to restricted access to health care, to welfare reform -- will shortly be faced by a much broader segment of society.
Take a deep look at accessibility as it applies to mobile and wearables. This book covers topics within the accessibility domain that are rarely covered or understood, despite the fact that nearly half of the world's population uses smartphones. Moreover, by 2025, 72% of smartphone users are expected to only use smartphones to access the internet. And yet, accessibility is often an afterthought instead of a core principle of product development. This book changes that. You will begin by exploring the current landscape and policy frameworks, looking at the software product lifecycle and how to embed inclusion from the start. You'll learn the nuances of mobile accessibility as it applies to mobile devices, wearables, and IoT. From there you'll move onto automated testing, accessibility and inclusion, and the next frontiers of emerging technology including AR and VR. There will be notes at the end of programming examples to help those in orthogonal roles, such as project management, understand the basics and the language to better communicate with their engineering counterparts. Over 1 billion people in the world live with some form of disability so it's imperative you devise a comprehensive game plan to make your digital products accessible for all. Beyond Accessibility Compliance is your guide to understanding the current landscape of assistive technology and how emerging techniques are changing the way we think about personalization and accessibility. You will: See how people with the most common forms of disabilities use digital products Review the basics of the product development lifecycle and how to embed accessibility Explore tangible answers as to how accessibility pertains to unique roles Understand the difference between compliance and usability Make data visualizations accessible for blind users Implement code-level changes to address gaps in accessibility Build a campus programs and course material inclusive for people with disabilities.
This book argues that two principal factors are inhibiting Native students from transitioning from school to college and from succeeding in their post-secondary studies. It presents models and examples of pathways to success that align with Native American students’ aspirations and cultural values.Many attend schools that are poorly resourced where they are often discouraged from aspiring to college. Many are alienated from the educational system by a lack of culturally appropriate and meaningful environment or support systems that reflect Indigenous values of community, sharing, honoring extended family, giving-back to one’s community, and respect for creation.The contributors to this book highlight Indigenized college access programs--meaning programs developed by, not just for--the Indigenous community, and are adapted, or developed, for the unique Indigenous populations they serve. Individual chapters cover a K-12 program to develop a Native college-going culture through community engagement; a “crash course” offered by a higher education institution to compensate for the lack of college counseling and academic advising at students’ schools; the role of tribal colleges and universities; the recruitment and retention of Native American students in STEM and nursing programs; financial aid; educational leadership programs to prepare Native principals, superintendents, and other school leaders; and, finally, data regarding Native American college students with disabilities. The chapters are interspersed with narratives from current Indigenous graduate students.This is an invaluable resource for student affairs practitioners and higher education administrators wanting to understand and serve their Indigenous students.
A scientific publication system needs to provide two basic services: access and evaluation. The traditional publication system restricts the access to papers by requiring payment, and it restricts the evaluation of papers by relying on just 2-4 pre-publication peer reviews and by keeping the reviews secret. As a result, the current system suffers from a lack of quality and transparency of the peer-review evaluation process, and the only immediately available indication of a new paper’s quality is the prestige of the journal it appeared in. Open access is now widely accepted as desirable and is slowly beginning to become a reality. However, the second essential element, evaluation, has received less attention. Open evaluation, an ongoing post-publication process of transparent peer review and rating of papers, promises to address the problems of the current system. However, it is unclear how exactly such a system should be designed. The evaluation system steers the attention of the scientific community and, thus, the very course of science. For better or worse, the most visible papers determine the direction of each field and guide funding and public policy decisions. Evaluation, therefore, is at the heart of the entire endeavor of science. As the number of scientific publications explodes, evaluation and selection will only gain importance. A grand challenge of our time, therefore, is to design the future system, by which we evaluate papers and decide which ones deserve broad attention. So far scientists have left the design of the evaluation process to journals and publishing companies. However, the steering mechanism of science should be designed by scientists. The cognitive, computational, and brain sciences are best prepared to take on this task, which will involve social and psychological considerations, software design, and modeling of the network of scientific papers and their interrelationships. This Research Topic in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience collects visions for a future system of open evaluation. Because critical arguments about the current system abound, these papers will focus on constructive ideas and comprehensive designs for open evaluation systems. Design decisions include: Should the reviews and ratings be entirely transparent, or should some aspects be kept secret? Should other information, such as paper downloads be included in the evaluation? How can scientific objectivity be strengthened and political motivations weakened in the future system? Should the system include signed and authenticated reviews and ratings? Should the evaluation be an ongoing process, such that promising papers are more deeply evaluated? How can we bring science and statistics to the evaluation process (e.g. should rating averages come with error bars)? How should the evaluative information about each paper (e.g. peer ratings) be combined to prioritize the literature? Should different individuals and organizations be able to define their own evaluation formulae (e.g. weighting ratings according to different criteria)? How can we efficiently transition toward the future system? Ideally, the future system will derive its authority from a scientific literature on community-based open evaluation. We hope that these papers will provide a starting point.
This volume not only examines traditional questions about broadband, such as availability and access, but also explores and evaluates metrics that are more applicable to the evolving technologies of information access. Importantly, the book provides a well-rounded, international perspective on theoretical approaches to communications policymaking in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Showcasing a diversity of approaches, this collection aims to help meet the myriad challenges involved in improving the development of communications policy around the world.
