The people at Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind don’t refer to their students as having disabilities.

Many of them are totally blind, some are legally blind and others are totally deaf, but instead of dwelling on what students and employees can’t do, the school focuses on what they can do.

The school was host to a technological symposium sponsored by the Alumni and Workers Association of Alabama School for the Blind.

The third ‘Blind Cricket World Cup’ will take place in Islamabad, Pakistan between December 4th to 16th, 2006. This was announced by the ‘World Blind Cricket Council’, recently.

The opening ceremony of the tournament will be held on December 3rd, World Disability Day and the finals will be played on December 16th. The tournament was scheduled to take place in South Africa but after organisational problems Pakistan stepped in to host the event.

Samsung Electronic's 'Braille mobile phone' enables visually impaired users to send and receive massages in Braille.

The mobile phone has a unique ‘Touch Messenger’ system that allows visually impaired users to send and receive Braille text messages. Users will be able to use two Braille keypads on the phone to send messages. Braille display screen on the lower part of the phone will allow them to read incoming messages.

It is anticipated that once the device hits the market it will facilitate about 180 million visually impaired people around the world.

Gerry Baze remembers the day he flopped on his couch and popped what he thought was a blood pressure pill. A few minutes after chasing it with a gulp of water, he told his wife, Maudie that he felt sleepy.

The blind couples now joke about the incident. “Now we know that this will never happen again,” said Maudie. “Now we are safe.”

Safety for Gerry and Maudie came in the form of ‘Rex’, a talking prescription bottle with a speaker that lets a pharmacist record the name of the drug, its purpose, when to take it and how much to take.

In order to boost distance education for persons with disabilities, their parents and trainers, the Rehabilitation Council of India (R.C.I.) signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian Space Research Organisation (I.S.R.O.) for setting up an EDUSAT up-linking station and studio within the Institute's premises.

This month, at the ‘Kolkata Book Fair’, ‘Voice of World’ will be ready to offer a new gift to the blind book lovers. The N.G.O. is going to release a Braille edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories called ‘Galpo Guchha’ during the event.

He was probably the first blind juror to sit on a Denver (Colorado, U.S.) jury. Joe Kovach, 29, recently sat on the jury that convicted gang member Timothy Guy Kemp of first-degree murder after a trial that lasted several days.

For Kovach, serving on the jury tested his senses and tested the ability of prosecutors, defense attorneys and Denver District Judge Morris Hoffman to put aside any beliefs they might have about a blind person sitting on a serious court case.

A new system called ‘vOICe’ (as in ‘oh-I-see’), gives the user an auditory ‘picture’ of what she or he‘s looking at.

vOICe includes a laptop connected to a special pair of sunglasses that are fitted with a small camera in the bridge and stereo headphones near the ear hooks. The camera feeds visual data to the computer, which translates the field of view into audible sounds. For example, louder sounds mean bright colours while a higher pitch means an object is located up high.

How to make textbooks and workbooks accessible to students affected with low vision?

Convert the pictures in the text and workbook to Power Point slides and then show them using a desktop computer, a multi-media projector and a screen. This way, an illustration in a textbook can be enlarged up to 100 times making it clearly visible to students.

Ms Lanka 2005 ‘ Beauty for a Cause ’ was organised by Technique International and co-sponsored by State Pharmaceutical Corporation (Sri Lanka) and other organisations.