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A fully accessible college dorm opening this week is believed to be the most user-friendly in the country for students with physical disabilities, offering the tools to transition to independence. Dorm rooms at the new facility at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign come complete with lifts for residents to get in and out of bed and use the bathroom, not to mention a pager system to call for assistance any time. Light switches and thermostats are reachable from a wheelchair and roll-in showers make life a little easier with built-in seats. But what’s truly innovative, university officials say, is that rooms for 17 students with disabilities are on the first floor of a dorm that will house hundreds of other students. Traditionally, students with disabilities lived separately from their typically developing peers.

"There's a lot of kids that are not able to play music just because they're not able to hold the musical instrument," said the 32-year-old Wan. "I think that there's a lot of children who would like to play music through some kind of way, so this is one of the reasons that I'm interested in this project."

SALT LAKE CITY — Not much is known about how children with autism fare as they become adults, including their employment opportunities, how they do socially and what kinds of support services they need. But with the resources received from a new three-year, $450,000 grant from autism activists Autism Speaks, University of Utah researchers hope to be able to shed more light on the issue through a new project and study.

Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).

And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.

Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.

I think it odd that I am actually seriously celebrating and thinking about the 20th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities act. As a man who has spent well over half of his life in a wheelchair with a permanent spinal cord injury I can say that my feelings about this landmark law have generally been negative. For instance, the law famously began as a civil rights act enforced by alleged victims filing lawsuits to force compliance in individual cases. I wonder if racial desegregation in education would have happened at all if Governor George Wallace had confronted a civil complaint instead of the National Guard on the steps of the University of Alabama back in 1963. The ADA was sadly bereft of enforcement teeth when it was passed 20 years ago. There have been phased upgrades that have produced some improvements in certain kinds of workplace accommodations and in particular, the IDEA law has bolstered equality for disabled students since its passage in 2004. In general, though, the ADA’s quiet, seemingly ad hoc effort to achieve a justice and equality that I found absolutely clear and imperative in my life has been frustrating. 

With the best of intentions, we spend enormous amounts of time and energy to "help" children and adults with disabilities. But what about the unintended consequences of our well-intentioned acts? When my son, Benjamin, was very young, I had the best of intentions when I made sure he had massive doses of developmental therapies. But this had an unintended negative impact: all the hours spent on therapy left little time for him to have any kind of normal childhood. This awareness led our family to do things differently.

In early 2006, 12-year-old Joshua Littman, who has Asperger’s syndrome, interviewed his mother, Sarah, at StoryCorps. Their one-of-a-kind conversation covered everything from cockroaches to Sarah’s feelings about Joshua as a son.

Many parents have questions about what to do when they are presented with an IEP that is not appropriate for their child. You should advise the IEP team that you don’t think the IEP is appropriate, that it does not provide your child with enough help or the right kind of help. You should use facts to support your position (i.e., facts from an evaluation of your child from a private sector evaluator, graphs of your child's test scores).

Learn how play deprivation is a kind of emotional and multisensory starvation and no group is more vulnerable than children who have disabilities.

Grandparents are often the first to suspect that a child may have autism and they play a major role in caring for children once they are diagnosed, according to preliminary findings from what is believed to be a first-of-its-kind survey of grandparents of those on the autism spectrum.

Today, we are opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users. There will even be a "request processing" button for un-captioned videos that any video owner can click on if they want to speed up the availability of auto-captions. It will take some time to process all the available video, so here are some things to keep in mind: While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken. Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can't be auto-captioned. President Obama's speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions. Auto-captions aren't perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they're accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient -- our speech recognition technology gets better every day. Auto-captions should be available to everyone who's interested in using them. We're also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you're having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit our Help Center: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers.

Burnaby's Steven Cayer isn't even out of high school yet, but he's got his eyes on a future in film and his hands on some one-of-a-kind camera equipment.The 17-year-old Burnaby Mountain student has cerebral palsy and gets around in a power wheelchair. Cayer had a chance to try out a specialized video camera to film some Olympic-related festivities last week.

A first of its kind park offering rides, playgrounds and other amusement activities designed specifically for those with special needs is set to open this week in San Antonio, Texas. The $32 million facility called Morgan’s Wonderland is fully-accessible. One ride, for example, is an off-road adventure where park goers sit in vehicles designed to accommodate wheelchairs while traveling through the twists and turns of rocky terrain.

In what is believed to be a first-of-its kind hospitality experience, a New Jersey hotel is offering guests an autism-friendly suite.

This session will offer an overview of the resources offered by AAC TechConnect to assist in AAC evaluations in the following ways: An overview of the unique "ACES Module and Toolkit Approach" will offer ideas for low-cost toolkits which can be assembled and used for effective AAC evaluations One-of-a-kind online clinical resources will be demonstrated for locating info at www.aacTechConnect.com for pictures/flyers/comparison charts for most AAC devices Descriptions of locale workshops including AAC Vendor Forums which are being scheduled nationally by AAC TechConnect/ATIA and hosted by local AT centers.

Welcome to the National Arts and Disability Center (NADC). Our mission is to promote the full inclusion of audiences and artists with disabilities into all facets of the arts community. The NADC is a leading consultant in the arts and disability community, and the only center of its kind. Our information is aimed at artists with disabilities, arts organizations, museums, arts administrators, disability organizations and agencies, performing arts organizations, art centers, universities, arts educators, and students. The NADC is a project of the University of California, at Los Angeles, Tarjan Center.