Greetings, fellow listers. This note is meant to announce that a high-profile blindness symposium is to occur in McKenna Hall on the campus of The University of Notre Dame in Indiana on Fri., 6 March, 2009, from 9:00-5:45 Eastern Standard Time. I am sending an advisory to GW Micro lists because leaders from GW Micro will play a prominent role during the afternoon, demonstrating and marketing several of this company’s innovative products for those who are blind or who have low vision. Because the greater South Bend, Indiana, area is reasonably close to Chicagoland, southern Michigan, Indianapolis, and Ohio, a significant number of persons will potentially find it feasible to attend. So, particularly if you live in the Midwestern United States, please forward to anyone you believe might have an interest in this, perhaps posting an advisory in any other newsletter or podcast to which you contribute.
For those not familiar with the Greater South Bend area or the Notre Dame campus, it is understandable that you may be curious about how to travel independently to, from, and within the venue where it is being held. Please know that reliable, low cost transportation is available, particularly to and from the South Bend Regional Airport. While there is no lunch provided at McKenna Hall for attendees, several good places to eat are within walking distance, and sighted guides will be available to help direct individuals and groups to their preferred dining locations. More info is available upon request for those who want it, and much of the critical logistical information is on the Notre Dame Web site and will be available in registration packets handed out near the entrance of McKenna Hall on the morning of March 6 itself. The happenings of March 6 fall into three broad categories: academic presentations, a museum tour, and a technology fair that will feature both hands-on equipment exploration and formal tech presentations. Some of these events will occur at the same time. So please read carefully what is below to get further explanation of each category. The highest profile aspects of this symposium are the keynote address by Dr. Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind; the presence of Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer and entrepreneur Adolph Kiefer; and the involvement of Dr. Georg Bodammer, a venture manager from the giant global corporation Siemens AG in Germany that is becoming increasingly involved in new navigational equipment for those without eyesight. Dr. Maurer will be on center stage roughly from 10:45 A.M. to 12:30 P.M and will speak directly to the enormous gap that remains in respect to employment of the blind in 21st century America. Athletically-minded attendees and parents of blind swimmers will be able to see first-hand the brand-new, highly affordable navigational aid called AdapTap that blind swimmers may use to keep their bearings in the often confusing and fast-moving environment of a swimming pool. Adolph Kiefer’s firm is helping to develop and market AdapTap, and Mr. Kiefer himself will be on hand for the presentation of the formal paper describing its history and function at 3:30 PM. At 1:30 PM, Dr. Bodammer from Siemens will present a paper that gives us a sneak peek at some experimental Orientation & Mobility technology not yet released to the general public that is being developed and tested in the nations that make up the European Union. At least one of these experimental devices never has been seen before in North America, but we expect it to be available for personalized demonstrations that may be arranged for individually either in Michiana or in the Greater Chicago area in the few days immediately following this event. This blindness symposium has been created at Notre Dame and is being administered by an ND special professional named Dr. Essaka Joshua, who conducts and supervises academic research in the area of disability studies. So this will be first and foremost an academic conference put on by one of North America's most prestigious institutions of higher learning. To that end, papers about the literary and historical significance of blindness through the ages will be formally presented by scholars from universities both in the USA and in Europe. For those who wish to do some active exploration, we have arranged for two optional tours of the world-famous Snite Museum of Art on the Notre Dame campus. There will be an overall tour of the Snite Museum at 10:00 A.M. Alternatively, a visitor may choose to go on a specialized tour featuring highlights from the special Darwin Exhibition currently being displayed there; the Darwin Exhibition tour begins at 9:45. Audio description will be provided in both tours. Each tour is designed to include a mix of blind or partially sighted and sighted people. Spaces are limited, so please send an email to Professor Joshua [email protected] if you would like to go on either tour. Apart from the academic focus and the museum tours, there is a third aspect to the March 6 symposium, intended to line up with the practical needs of teachers or members of the blind community: Following Dr. Maurer's time in the spotlight and a brief lunch break, the afternoon will feature a technology fair that runs concurrently with the last three paper presentations. As a part of that tech fair, we will present four focused seminars of practical and educational significance to special education teachers, vocational rehabilitation professionals, blind persons, and family members or friends of blind persons. The lineup for these presentations, as it stands now, is as follows: 2:00 PM: Select members from the leadership team of GW Micro, developers of the Window-Eyes screen reading program and distributors of the Braille Sense notetaker, the SenseNav GPS system, and the SenseView closed circuit TV, show off the benefits and new features related to their increasingly robust and popular products. 3:00 PM: The Sendero Group, featuring accessible GPS solutions and other leading-edge portable technology for the blind. Enter a drawing for a chance to win a signed copy of "Crashing Through," the inspirational true story of Sendero's president and adventurer-in-chief Michael May. This book, authored by Robert Kurson, was published by Random House in 2007 and is available in Braille, CD, cassette tape, and Internet download. 4:00 PM: Wade Wingler of the Easter Seals Crossroads Assistive Technology Center in Indianapolis. Wade discusses the new INDATA Project making technology affordable for members of the disabled community who earn a low income and/or who do not qualify for direct state funding assistance. 5:00 PM: Hadley School for the Blind, based in Winnetka, Illinois. Hadley has provided distance learning opportunities in Braille, in large print, and now online, for nearly 90 years to blind citizens of more than 100 countries. Aside from the long-form presentations listed above, we are expecting demonstration/informational booths to be staffed all afternoon by ADEC Inc., Bosma Enterprises, the Chicago Lighthouse, En-Vision America, Easter Seals/Crossroads, Eye Can See, GH LLC, GW Micro, the Hadley School for the Blind, the Indiana Talking Book and Braille Library, the National Federation of the Blind of Indiana, Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, the Saint Joseph County [Indiana] Election Board, the Sendero Group, the Social Security Administration, and the United States Association of Blind Athletes. Again, I recognize that those who seriously consider attending may want to know a lot more specific information about how to arrive at the symposium's location, how to navigate across the Notre Dame campus and throughout the community (as in availability of public transportation), how to make lodging arrangements, where to eat, what each part of the formal academic presentation consists of, and when each part is to be held. Out of respect to the high server demands that go with operating a listserv, I am not including specifics like these in this message. But answers to these critical concerns do exist in other documents that the project team has drawn up, with still further practical/logistical information having been made available on the University of Notre Dame's Web site. The official electronic publicity about this event may be found at http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicid=31546&seltopicid=3427. Both the academic conference and the technology fair will be open at no charge to the general public. But because space in the auditorium and demonstration rooms is limited, registration is strongly encouraged. If you wish to attend, or if you have a question relating to the formal presentations or the practical side of how to get to this symposium and how to meet your basic life needs while you are there, you are cordially invited to write to the principal organizer of this symposium: Dr. Essaka Joshua [email protected]. If you got this message from the GW-Info list, you may simply reply to it and I will direct your inquiry to the appropriate place, since replies will go personally to me. If you have questions related strictly to the technology fair exhibitors and the products they are presenting, please write either to me [email protected] or to Lori Miller [email protected]. For all those on this list who do not find this symposium feasible to attend or relevant to your lives, I thank you in advance for your forbearance and hope you take this announcement in the helpful spirit for which it is intended. Sincerely, Kane Brolin Office: (574)386-8868, Ext. 1 Mobile: (574)386-8868 If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message.
