National Assistive Technology Awareness Day

A congressional resolution recently designated March 27, 2019 as “National Assistive Technology Awareness Day. Fortunately, the Maui Vision Impairment and Blindness Education and Peer Support (VIBES) Group welcomed the perfect guest speaker at their meeting on that day. AILH Advocacy Coordinator, Brian Hauser, shared with the group about how he uses assistive technology to do his work. He was able to provide some great demonstrations of the text to speech (Optical Character Recognition) and speech to text capabilities. Brian spoke about various advocacy efforts including “visitability,” and the group had a discussion about advocacy related to pedestrian safety and “walkability.” At the end of the meeting several members had some questions about various services and products and other members of the group were able to share their experiences and suggestions. It was another great meeting of learning and sharing! The next meeting of the VIBES group is April 24th from 1:00-2:30 p.m. in Kahului. Contact IL Specialist, Kathleen Kenney for more information: kathleenk@alohailhawaii.org / 808 866 4690.