Staff of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Neurotechnology (CNT) have created an outreach blog designed to explain neuroscience and sensorimotor neural engineering to under-represented youth.
The Saturday Computing Experience was an eight-week program that had been held at the University of Washington for local high school students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The program introduced students to computers and computer programming with the goal of encouraging them to consider college majors and careers in computing fields. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for three years, the inaugural Saturday Computing Experience was held in spring 2011. Approximately ten students participated each year.
In an effort to increase computer science awareness among youth with disabilities, the University of Alabama, Auburn University, and United Cerebral Palsy of Birmingham collaborated to host two Computer Science Fun Days. The participants engaged in fun, interactive computer and robotics activities and learned about numerous opportunities in the field of computer science.
A speech-to-text service is an accommodation that can be used by a student who is deaf or hard-of-hearing as a way to gain access to spoken or auditory content. With speech-to-text services, a provider listens to a speaker and then produces text for the person who is deaf or hard-of-hearing to read on a computer screen, TV monitor, or projection screen. Speech-to-text service is often called real-time captioning, and the providers are often referred to as captionists or transcribers.
The Workforce Recruitment Program (WRP), which is co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment and the US Department of Defense, is a recruitment and referral program for college students and recent college graduates with disabilities. Through the program, students are matched with summer internships or permanent jobs in the federal government. Since 1995, over seven thousand students or recent graduates have been placed in internships or jobs in a wide variety of fields and locations through the WRP.
The Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Computing was an academically challenging program designed for deaf and hard of hearing students with skills in math or science who may be considering careers in computing. The program introduced students to computers and computer programming with the goal of encouraging them to consider college majors and careers in computing fields. The Summer Academy occurred annually at the University of Washington (UW) between 2007 and 2013.
To expose high school students with disabilities to computer sciences and related careers, the North Central Florida High School High Tech program undertook the Computer Science Exploration Project. The Project offered a series of nine hands-on events. An event was held once a month and included visits to:
The Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) is the world's largest organization dedicated to the study of how humans interact with interactive technologies. In 2011, the SIGCHI Executive Committee began discussing ways to become more inclusive of researchers and practitioners with disabilities.
Some individuals with disabilities require assistive technology (AT) in order to access computers. Although Apple has been criticized for the accessibility shortcomings of its Mac OS operating system, it made significant progress in improving accessibility with the release of Mac OS X, and has taken it upon itself to develop and provide AT that supports and ships with its OS, without additional cost to the consumer.
XML is short for Extensible Markup Language and is a specification from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is a meta-syntax, used to define new markup languages. XML's key benefits are its extensibility (XML-based languages can be extended with new custom tags) and its portability (XML-based languages can be used across different platforms and devices).