Disability Futures

Whether it’s hiking alone or walking down a street after dark — sometimes you want to know someone's got your back. To help you feel safe and give your friends and family peace of mind, today we're launching Trusted Contacts. This new personal safety app lets you share your location with loved ones in everyday situations and when emergencies arise — even if your phone is offline or you can’t get to it. 

Here’s how it works: Once you install the Android app, you can assign “trusted” status to your closest friends and family. Your trusted contacts will be able to see your activity status — whether you’ve moved around recently and are online — to quickly know if you're OK. If you find yourself in a situation where you feel unsafe, you can share your actual location with your trusted contacts. And if your trusted contacts are really worried about you, they can request to see your location. If everything’s fine, you can deny the request. But if you’re unable to respond within a reasonable time frame, your location is shared automatically and your loved ones can determine the best way to help you out. Of course, you can stop sharing your location or change your trusted contacts whenever you want.

Inclov helps individuals seek out others who share their condition or something similar, which could lead to meeting someone who understands their situation well. But while Inclov does connect those with physical and mental disorders, it is not a walled garden; anyone can sign up to use the app, in recognition of the fact that healthy relationships are possible between all kinds of people.

Using dating apps can be a challenge for anyone–having to worry about choosing the right pictures, writing a bio that’s equal parts witty and intellectual, and initiating conversation in an interesting (but not an imposing) manner. For individuals with disabilities, things can be even more complex. Those from the community who have tried using a dating app or have tried online dating in general have described the experience as being offensive, hurtful, creepy, and revealing of ignorance. Educating the masses on the topic is important, but to address the dating issue, creating a platform specifically for those with physical and mental challenges would be a good first step.

The first thing Inclov does right is ensure accessibility for the visually and hearing impaired. A font size and color selector are available to those with vision affected by retinal disorders or color blindness. There’s a screen reader that works in conjunction with Google’s TalkBack feature so the app is easy to use for the hearing impaired. In an attempt to make users comfortable with sharing personal information without fear of it being circulated, screenshots are disabled. 

Not Dead Yet and other disability advocates and rehabilitation physicians have worked with Respecting Choices, a national leader in the field of advance care planning, to develop fact sheets on feeding tubes and breathing supports. Today, they announce the results of an over two year collaborative effort.

The project began following an open letter from disability advocates dated December 2013. According to the letter, previous versions of the documents expressed a strong bias against long-term use of feeding tubes, BiPAPs and ventilators, potentially discouraging health care consumers and medical professionals from using these life-sustaining devices except for short-term recovery and not as part of a viable disability lifestyle. The Not Dead Yet open letter was signed by over thirty disability organizations as well as twenty-five individuals who have successfully used one or more of these devices for years, and in some cases for decades.

In response to the letter, Respecting Choices began a dialogue with disability advocates, which led to a productive exchange and, ultimately, to substantially revised fact sheets on feeding tubes and breathing supports. These documents are intended to provide consumers, as well as legal and medical advisers, important information for health care decision-making and advance directives.

A formal joint announcement is below and can also be viewed online on the Respecting Choices website, and the revised fact sheets are online (feeding tubes, breathing supports) and available for purchase from Respecting Choices.

#CripLit Twitter Chat
Resistance Through Writing
Sunday, December 4, 2016
4 pm Pacific/ 7 pm Eastern
Co-Hosts: Nicola Griffith @Nicolaz and Alice Wong @DisVisibility

Co-partners of #CripLit, novelist Nicola Griffith and Disability Visibility Project’s Alice Wong, are proud to host the fourth #CripLit Twitter chat for disabled writers.

All disabled writers are welcome to participate in the chat including reporters, essayists, poets, cartoonists, bloggers, freelancers, unpublished or published. We want to hear from all of you! Check the #CripLit hashtag on Twitter for announcements of future chats that will focus on different genres or topics.

How to Participate

Follow @nicolaz and @DisVisibility on Twitter

Use the hashtag #CripLit when you tweet. If you only want to respond to the questions, check @DisVisibility’s timeline during the chat. The questions will be timed several minutes apart.  

Check out this explanation of how to participate in a chat by Ruti Regan:

If you don’t use Twitter and want to follow along in real-time, check out the live-stream:http://twubs.com/CripLit  

The product is a speed control system that helps wheelchair users slow down on ramps. You do not need to be a wheelchair user to share your thoughts.

All you have to do is answer simple multiple choice questions on "look and feel" preferences.  There are 12 multiple choice questions and you only need 10-15 minutes to complete the survey. Using a desktop or larger screen will make filling out this survey easier.
 

A little bit more about us:
We're a team of graduate students in the Univerity of Michigan's College of Engineering. A prototype of this product will be presented at the Design Expo on December 8. You will have the option to share additional feedback at the end of the survey.

Personal information for roughly 480,000 people was exposed in two separate privacy incidents earlier this year involving the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's website.

The two incidents occurred on Aug. 29 and Sept. 14, the department said in a statement posted to its website Monday. HUD mailed letters to affected individuals in early November apologizing for the incidents and detailing the steps the agency is taking to address them. The letters were signed by the department's executive secretary and senior agency official for privacy, Helen Goff Foster.

"In August and September of 2016, HUD learned that some of this information was temporarily made available to the public through its website," Foster wrote. "As soon as HUD learned of these incidents, all further access to it was stopped and HUD took steps to prevent future incidents."

In addition to removing access to the affected webpages, HUD said it had conducted a review to determine the scope of the incidents and what data was exposed.

The first incident involved information for 50,727 people. The information was inadvertently made public when businesses uploaded employee data in HUD's EZ/RC Locator, an online tool that determines tax credit eligibility. The data, which included Social Security Numbers, was stored on an unsecured webserver.

"Although this excess data was uploaded to the Department's webserver by private businesses, the data was not requested by the Department and was not necessary for determining whether the businesses were eligible for the tax credit," the department said in the statement.

The second incident occurred when HUD shared community service requirement information with local public housing authorities, exposing personal information for roughly 429,000 people in the process. The information included the last four digits of Social Security Numbers, last names and public housing building codes.

The agency is offering one year of free credit monitoring services through TransUnion to affected individuals. Those implicated by the data security breaches must enroll by March 31, 2017 to receive these services.

On November 21, 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed a Final Rule revising the Justice Department’s Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) title III regulation to further clarify a public accommodation’s obligation to provide appropriate auxiliary aids and services for people with disabilities. The Final Rule requires require movie theaters to: (1) have and maintain the equipment necessary to provide closed movie captioning and audio description at a movie patron’s seat whenever showing a digital movie produced, distributed, or otherwise made available with these features; (2) provide notice to the public about the availability of these features; and (3) ensure that theater staff is available to assist patrons with the equipment before, during, and after the showing of a movie with these features.

The first in a series of a video campaign to free people with disabilities trapped in nursing homes and other facilities in the US.

I am so glad this question was asked, and thank you to whoever posted for putting yourself in someone else's shoes. In less than a month, I will be 26. I have Turner Syndrome. I posted a picture (albeit goofy) to show one probably would not know about my health condition without me disclosing.

I was diagnosed around age 4. I simply was not growing sufficiently (falling behind on the average growth curve). I was referred to a pediatric endocrinologist that, among many other things, perscribed me daily growth hormone shots so I could grow to 5′2″. When I was 12, I had to start on estrogen to aid me through puberty.

The doctors appointments and such were challenging for my whole family. My parents divorced when I was young (not saying this is why).

As an adult, my greatest challenge has been knowing I am infertile. Most of the people I know are married and starting families. Dating is rough when I have to tell a partner I will be adopting if I start a family (and I have been left over this before). I have a sister that considered being my egg donor in time but decided against it. This hurt but was completely understandable.

Most people (even my family) are oblivious to how heart wrenching this can all be.