WASHINGTON, DC -- On Thursday, September 27, the National Council on Disability (NCD), an independent federal agency, released “Rocking the Cradle: Ensuring the Rights of Parents with Disabilities and Their Children” -- a groundbreaking policy study, infused with real life stories of parents with disabilities, to provide a comprehensive overview of factors that support and obstruct Americans with all kinds of disabilities from exercising their fundamental right to begin and maintain families.

A community-powered website for blind and low-vision users of Apple's range of Mac computers, the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. AppleVis is a rich resource that strives to empower the community by offering multiple pathways to access and share relevant and useful information. As a community, we seek to encourage and support people in exploring the many ways in which these mainstream products and related applications can offer opportunities to the vision-impaired for personal enrichment, independence and empowerment.

Technology Central is designed to provide the autism community with the latest information, tools, and resources so that everyone can benefit from the great strides being made in the world of technology!

The U.S. Department of Education has released a free, two-part training toolkit designed to reduce incidents of bullying, for use by classroom teachers and educators. The toolkit was developed by the Safe and Supportive Schools Technical Assistance Center, supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Safe and Healthy Students, in collaboration with the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers.

There’s a group of students struggling through school rd to navigate that gets little attention in the media or in the debate about how to fix schools: Children with ADHD. ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is a brain condition that makes it especially hard for children to focus and concentrate in school and has a number of other symptoms. It is too often misunderstood by teachers, parents and even the students themselves. According to the Centers for Disease Control, about 9.5% or 5.4 million children 4-17 years of age, had been diagnosed with ADHD, as of 2007. Many others who have the disorder haven’t had the benefit of a diagnosis. Here is a powerful post by David Bernstein, a nonprofit executive who lives in Gaithersburg, Md., writing about the difficulties that his two sons, ages 7 and 15, have confronted in school as a result of ADHD.

NEW YORK -- Rebuffing an intensive lobbying campaign, a task force of the American Psychiatric Association has decided not to list the disputed concept of parental alienation in the updated edition of its catalog of mental disorders. The term conveys how a child's relationship with one estranged parent can be poisoned by the other parent, and there's broad agreement that it sometimes occurs in the context of divorces and child-custody disputes. However, an acrimonious debate has raged for years over whether the phenomenon should be formally classified as a mental health disorder by the psychiatric association as it updates its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for the first time since 1994.

“We need more research to be able to understand how to treat core symptoms of autism in this population, as well as common associated symptoms such as anxiety, compulsive behaviors and agitation,” said Jeremy Veenstra-VanderWeele, M.D., assistant professor of Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Pharmacology and Vanderbilt Kennedy Center investigator. “Individuals, families and clinicians currently have to make decisions together, often in a state of desperation, without clear guidance on what might make things better and what might make things worse, and too often, people with autism spectrum disorders end up on one or more medications without a clear sense of whether the medicine is helping.”

This Showcase is an easily searchable collection of resources related to special education dispute resolution that are of value to parents and the centers who serve them. The resources found here are also beneficial to educators and professionals who work with family members.

Donations continued to come in hours after Sunday’s NAMI Walk. By evening, the tally was up to $118,000 raised to help generate resources and awareness for those with mental illness.“This has been our best walk ever,” said Matt Kuntz, executive director of NAMI Montana, as he admired the crowd gathered at Memorial Park.Before the walk began, $86,000 had already been raised.More than 2,300 people of all ages from across the state laced up their sneakers to participate in the 5K.

These videos have been produced to help providers better understand ways to use observation, documentation, and assessment to inform practice. You can watch the clips online or download QuickTime versions of the videos for use in educational and professional development activities.

Positive behavior support: that phrase got your attention, didn’t it? It sounds like a great idea, but most people don’t actually want to put in the effort for it.  Unfortunately, punishment and negative attention – comments such as “Stop it!” and “No!” – seem to come more naturally to most of us. But this idea just won’t go away.  So – what is it and why is it here to stay?

Successfully recovering from bipolar disorder is a message of hope that speaker and “Signature Walker” Laurie Johnson plans to share at this year’s NAMI Walk, Sunday at 12:30 p.m. at Memorial Park. (Registration starts at 11 a.m.)

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once described England and America as two countries separated by a common language. Now research from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center suggests that common language may also be the divide standing between mothers of critically ill newborns and the clinicians who care for them.

The transition from school to employment is a critical time in the lives of youth with disabilities. Collected here are strategies to help youth and their families access the full range of support available to prepare them for successful transition into integrated, competitive employment.

The sheer number of people with disabilities makes them an important voting block, researchers say, but turnout among the group is severely lagging. In 2008, voter participation among people with disabilities was 11 percent lower than that of typically developing individuals, according to a new study. “Fully closing the disability gap would have led to 3 million more voters in 2008 and 3.2 million more voters in 2010, potentially affecting many races and subsequent public policies,” the report published in the journal Social Science Quarterly found.

A host of one-stop centers tasked with helping people with disabilities access support services are getting more federal assistance. Some $12.5 million is heading to Aging and Disability Resource Centers across the country, officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said. The funding will help support counselors who aid people with disabilities and their caregivers in accessing long-term services and supports.

The White House is warning that special education will face more than $1 billion in cuts and millions more will be trimmed from other federal programs for people with disabilities next year unless lawmakers act. In a report sent to Congress Friday, the Obama administration painted a stark picture of what’s to come, detailing the impact of more than $100 billion in automatic spending cuts that are scheduled to take effect Jan. 2.

Travis Moses is a blind student who can’t always do his homework because an online program the University of Montana uses is inaccessible to him.Moses, a senior in the social work program, is one of some 1,121 students registered with UM’s Disability Student Services. He estimates from 75 percent to 90 percent of his classes have an online component – and some UM courses are only online.“I’ve been told every year, ‘Oh, we’re working on it,’ ” Moses said Monday. “Well, you know, I’ve gotten to the point that I doubt it. I’m angry that something was put in place that was not verified.”Last May, the Alliance for Disability and Students at the University of Montana – ADSUM – filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education alleging students such as Moses who have disabilities face discrimination at UM. On Monday, the department’s Office for Civil Rights confirmed in an email the complaint about educational technologies is under investigation.

Health insurance can be an invaluable resource for families with children with autism to help make the often high-cost and high-frequency treatments for their child more affordable.  However, making sure that services and providers are covered can be confusing and time-consuming.  Below are some tips for how to make the process more manageable and to maximize coverage.

Every person on the face of the Earth has to work to get where they want to go in life. The same goes for people with autism; the only difference is that autistics have to work harder, a lot harder. Hello, my name is Alexis Wineman and this is just my story.