There’s still a long way to go in upholding disability rights 20 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to the Justice Department’s top civil rights attorney. Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez told a group of disability rights attorneys Thursday that despite enforcement efforts, thousands of Americans remain unnecessarily institutionalized and accessibility is not as universal as it should be.

This is a guest post by Dr. Michele Savel. Dr. Savel is a pediatric dentist practicing on Long Island, New York who has specialty dental training to work with children who have special needs. Dr. Savel worked with Autism Speaks to help create the Dental Toolkit. To learn more about Dr. Savel please visit:  www.kiddsmiles.com. 

Sunday night, Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama, kicked off the President’s and White House’s celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act while delivering remarks to over 2,000 people from around the World at the VSA International Festival at the Kennedy Center.

My name is Jamie Knight, and I am an autistic front end web developer from the UK. In this article I am going to explore how Apple technology fundamentally changes my life, and enriches the lives of others. Disabilities, differences, call them what you will, have for a long time been a great area for technology to help. From the first white canes to the latest assistive and augmentative communication aids, there are a range of needs out there which technology is able to fulfil. For this article I would like to focus on 3 areas: communication, organisation and management. These are the ways in which my autism affects me and where technology helps the most.

ASAT is a not-for-profit organization of parents and professionals committed to improving the education, treatment, and care of people with autism. Since autism was first identified, there has been a long history of failed treatments and fads, levied on vulnerable individuals as well as on their families. From the scandal of the “refrigerator mother” theory, to the ongoing parade of “miracle cures” and “magical breakthroughs”, history has been dominated by improbable theories about causation and treatments.

Pediatricians should take a lead role in identifying and helping children experiencing mental health disorders, a national pediatricians group said Tuesday. Roughly 1 in 5 children experience a mental health disorder, but just 20 percent of those children receive treatment for such conditions. And pediatricians must fill this gap, according to a mental health task force from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Families of children born premature fare well long-term, even when those children experience developmental disabilities, new research indicates. In the first study to look at the impact of prematurity on families into young adulthood, researchers followed about 250 families, half of whom had a child with extremely low birth weight and half of whom had a child born with normal weight.

Here's one way to lighten a student's backpack: say goodbye to textbooks.Clearwater High School next year will replace traditional textbooks with e-readers. The gadgets will be fully loaded with all the textbooks students need, minus all the paper.

NEW YORK — Next fall, when millions of kids tune into Cartoon Network to watch Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo and other favorites, they'll encounter something new — an ambitious campaign to enlist them as foot soldiers in the fight against bullying.Unlike many bullying programs, this one is geared toward middle school, where experts say bullying is most common. It also targets not bullies nor the bullied, but kids who witness bullying, giving them appropriate techniques to intervene.

Kentucky's public teachers and principals would see their yearly evaluations tied partly to their students' performance, under a proposal that state education officials hope will boost the state's chances of receiving up to $175million in federal education funding, according to a draft obtained by The Courier-Journal.

Even as a youngster, Anthony Vasquez exhibited a probing curiosity and a pulsing energy to seek out new experiences. That drive continued when he entered Cal State Long Beach and decided that learning Chinese would be a worthy challenge. On Thursday, he will be honored as the outstanding graduate in the College of Liberal Arts, a recognition of a cumulative grade point average of 3.895 while earning bachelor’s degrees in journalism and Chinese studies. But for his family, friends and teachers, the honor and academic achievements have special meaning because Vasquez is blind. He used Braille and specialized computer software to learn Chinese and now speaks Mandarin as well as Spanish and English.

May 21, 2010 — Results from a new randomized trial show that children with Tourette's syndrome and chronic tic disorders have greater improvement in tics and tic-related impairment with comprehensive behavioral intervention than with supportive therapy and education. "Historically, Tourette's syndrome has been treated with antipsychotic medications, which reduce tics but are associated with side effects that often limit their usefulness in children," lead author John Piacentini, PhD, from the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement. "So the development of an effective nonmedication treatment for children with this disorder is a major therapeutic advance."

TUESDAY, May 25 (HealthDay News) -- When Connie Anderson's son was diagnosed with autism a decade ago, she scoured the Internet looking for treatments.

"I tried all sorts of things I now consider bananas," said Anderson, now community scientific liaison at Kennedy Krieger Institute's Interactive Autism Network. "At the time it didn't feel like nonsense. It was hope. People will try all sorts of things to help their child, sometimes even against their better judgment."

This project explores the life stories of thirteen leaders in the self-advocacy movement and their perspectives on key issues and leadership challenges. Part of the broader disability rights movement, the self-advocacy movement is unique in that it has been led and informed by the individual and collective experiences of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Despite its widespread existence nationwide and internationally, few works have explored the rich history, culture, and significance of the self-advocacy movement. To help fill this void, Joe Caldwell, Ph.D., Department of Disability and Human Development, University of Illinois at Chicago, undertook this life history project and donated transcripts to The Bancroft Library for its Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement collection. More about Self-Advocacy Movement oral history project.

For 40 years, Gail Bechard has had butterflies in her stomach every Sunday night during the school year.

A preschool teacher at Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind, Bechard said she's always been excited about the week ahead.

The News Station's Marnee Banks shares the story of the Petty family in Helena, who have five children, in part one of her series "Living With Autism."

When a Chicago-area photographer gave cameras to kids with autism they took pictures of everything from flowers to pets, but it was the opportunity to see the world in a new way that proved eye-opening. Now the work of 19 children with the developmental disorder is the basis for a gallery show.

A few weeks ago, I announced that I've decided to help my 23 year old son, who has autism,cultivate friendships (or more) with the opposite sex. Today,let me back up and describe the incident that inspired me to tackle this gargantuan task.

Our mission is to promote and provide equal access to communication and learning through described and captioned educational media. The ultimate goal of the DCMP is for accessible media to be an integral tool in the teaching and learning process for all stakeholders in the educational community, including students, educators and other school personnel, parents, service providers, businesses, and agencies.

A California psychiatrist pushing for a revolution in the way people with mental illnesses are treated found a receptive audience in Helena Wednesday. As part of a weeklong visit to Montana, Mark Ragins, medical director of the Village Integrated Service Agency in Long Beach, told a group of around 60 mental health professionals and community members that his philosophy for recovery from mental illness focuses on empowering the person with the illness, teaching self-responsibility and helping the person find and lead a meaningful life.