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FamilyConnect™ has a number of resources for parents of children and teenagers who are blind or visually impaired. If you are looking for fun, accessible games and activities for the holiday season, we hope you will find the following links helpful.

Click here to register!What:The Montana Talking Book Library provides specialized equipment and an exhaustive list of titles in the Talking Book format for patrons with visual or other physical impairments that make sight reading difficult.  A free service available to any qualifying Montanan, the Talking Book Library also records Montana authors to contribute home-grown content to TBL services elsewhere.  For an overview on how to make a referral and what services are available from the MT TBL, tune into a Webinar tomorrow morning.  One hour CE Credit – Library Services to the Public. When:Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 9:00-10:00 amContact:For more information, contact jflick@mt.gov

In a much anticipated release, at this year’s Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) conference HumanWare and Code Factory debuted Oratio for the BlackBerry, the first-ever screen reader for the visually impaired using this smart phone. Oratio uses text-to-speech technology to convert the visual information displayed on the BlackBerry screen into audio output. Finally, visually impaired persons who don’t have an iPhone can have an accessible experience (the iPhone uses Apple’s proprietary VoiceOver screen reader.)

As the Technology Coach for Educational Vision Services, the program in the NYC Department of Education that serves students in our school system with visual impairments, I have been looking for a way to provide students with low-vision access to large print using the iPad. Our students are registered with Bookshare.org but it has been a stumbling block converting the DAISY formatted books into the epub format that can be read on the iPad. While there are numerous options for our students who are auditory or Braille readers, there has been a large disconnect in taking advantage of technology for our students who require large print and alternate contrast for visual reading.

The U.S. Department of Education today announced the availability of free, video-on-demand children’s television programming for thousands of students who are blind, visually impaired, deaf or hard of hearing.

AppleVis is a website by and for blind and vision-impaired users of Apple devices, primarily iOS device users but including some resources for Mac OS X users. The focus is on VoiceOver users but there are some resources for other blind users who use zooming to access devices too.

Accessibility — also referred to as inclusivity — is all about making the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad work for as wide a range of people as possible. That can include the very young, the very old, people brand new to computers and mobile devices, and also people with disabilities and special needs. With iOS, Apple has added features to specifically help those with visual impairments, including blindness, color blindness, and low vision, with auditory impairments including deafness in one or both ears, physical or motor skill impairments, including limited coordination or range of motion, and learning challenges, including autism and dyslexia. It also includes general features, like Siri and FaceTime which can provide significant value for the blind or the deaf. Many of these features can be found in Settings, all of them can be found on the iPhone and iPad.

Yes, you read right: The National Federation of the Blind and Virginia Tech have just announced they're working together to build a car that a visually impaired person can drive independently.

Our goal is to show that all students can fully participate in science. To that end, we are sharing some of the resources, materials, and activities that we use with our students who are visually impaired.

ECCadvocacy.org, a joint web site of the American Foundation for the Blind and Perkins School for the Blind, dedicated to ensuring that children who are blind, visually impaired, and deafblind have access to equal and appropriate education through the Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC).

Editor's Note: This review of the iPhone will probably be the deepest you'll ever read. Austin Seraphin is legally blind, though he can some light and color. He believes the device is the future of accessibility for the visually impaired. The powerful story he tells here explains why.

Amazon is making some enhancements to its Kindle electronic reader, aimed at improving the reading experience for people who are blind, visually impaired, or dyslexic.

SAN FRANCISCO — Even as audio versions of best-sellers fill store shelves and new technology fuels the popularity of digitized books, the number of titles accessible to people who are blind or dyslexic is minuscule.A new service being announced Thursday by the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco is trying to change that. The group has hired hundreds of people to scan thousands of books into its digital database — more than doubling the titles available to people who aren't able to read a hard copy.Brewster Kahle, the organization's founder, says the project will initially make 1 million books available to the visually impaired, using money from foundations, libraries, corporations and the government. He's hoping a subsequent book drive will add even more titles to the collection.

There are several amazing websites that do an excellent job of incorporating Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. As you know, UDL is all about creating learning environments that meet the needs of all types of learners—closed captioning for the hearing impaired, read-aloud capabilities for the visually impaired, for example.

Development of the “All Children Can Read” website began in 2006 as part of the work of the NCDB’s (National Consortium on Deaf-Blindness) Literacy Practice Partnership. This group envisioned the creation of a central location to provide information and resources to individual state deaf-blind projects, teachers, family members and related service providers interested in beginning or enhancing literacy instruction for children who have combined vision and hearing loss and children with other complex learning challenges. Following literature reviews of literacy learning for all children, children who are blind or visually impaired, children who are deaf or hearing impaired, children with multiple disabilities and children with deaf-blindness, a set of literacy indicators and corresponding strategies was developed to help guide instructional planning.