Congratulations to the graduates of the Delta cohort of the Masters of Inclusive Design. The newly celebrated Master of Inclusive Design are:

• Catalina De la Rocha
• Rushmita Alam
• Erica Charbonneau
• Geordie Graham
• Dennis Lagman
• Jingyi Lai
• Yu Lin
• Chengyi Lu (Zimmo)
• Amita Pharshy
• Deepshikha Sharma
• Taliesin Smith
• Vanessa Vilic Evangelista
• Caren Watkins
• Jacob Willow
• Jeff Woodrow
• Koni Xie
• Yu Zhang
• Mohsen Mahjoobnia

Join us in celebrating their accomplishments.

For a third year, the Inclusive Design Institute is pleased to offer a free innovation summer camp for high school students. Starting in July across 6 locations across Ontario, the Sprout Ideas Camp blends social innovation, technology, and design thinking skills to engage students in building problem solving and teamwork skills.

Mentors from the industry and post-secondary institutions will support students as they prototype, develop, and present their ideas. The camp is completely free of charge and transportation funding is available for anyone in financial need.

The dates and locations for the camps are:

• July 11-15: Niagara (DSBN Education Centre)
• July 18-21: Hamilton (UN University)
• July 25-29: Fort Frances High School
• July 25-29: Toronto (OCAD University)
• August 15-19: Toronto (York University)
• August 22-26: Thunder Bay (Lakehead University)

For more information, registration, and a video from last year’s camp, please see the Sprout Ideas Camp website.

May 29, 2016 –  Today people around the world are celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day (or GAAD) as a way to raise awareness about the importance of building accessible websites and digital content so that people with disabilities are able to access them with ease.

For more information about Global Accessibility Awareness Day, visit their website.

We offer many services, tools, and resources to help you toward your accessibility goals:

• WebSavvy – Accessibility Reporting, Consultation, and Auditing
• AChecker – The Free online Accessibility Tool
• Learning Web Accessibility: Courses and Resources
• IDRC Web Accessibility Workshops

What is it like to attend the Web For All Conference? Can’t make it to Montreal this year to take part? Elizabeth Neal from the American Foundation for the Blind shares her experiences from this year’s conference. The conference theme this year is “Education for All on the Web”.

Elizabeth makes remarks on Jutta Treviranus’ keynote: “[Jutta] argued that accessibility strategies must recognize that accessibility is relative—to individual requirements, goals, and context—not absolute. Therefore, we need regulations that are responsive and evolving, not static.”

Elizabeth also remarks on Michael Cooper’s talk about Web Accessibility for the 2020’s and the challenges that lay ahead.

Visit “Reflections of a First-Time Attendee at the Web For All Conference” at the American Foundation for the Blind’s website for the complete article.

In December 2013, the province of Manitoba passed legislation on the Accessibility for Manitobans Act which defines 5 new accessibility standards for the province. The first standard, customer service, must be met by 2017. But what comes after the law has been passed?

On March 15, IDRC director Jutta Treviranus visited the University of Manitoba to share experiences and best practices of Inclusive Design in a legislated landscape.

” ‘Since laws are not agile, our choices within the law are important.’ She emphasizes the importance of responsive, iterative solutions that focus on collaboration among diverse perspectives.”

Source: “Planning for accessibility Beyond the law“, University of Manitoba.

How we live and how we die are questions that need further exploration and discussion set within an inclusive framework that engages a broad spectrum of individuals and perspectives, particularly the perspectives of our most vulnerable populations which includes persons who experience disabilities or the effects of aging. Research is showing that many Canadians support assisted death. The controversy is situated within many contexts, predominately institutional spheres, where law and policy makers are subject to pressures from many different perspectives, including self-interest groups.

This leads to the heart of the question: who should decide when and how we die?

Please join OCAD Graduate Studies in Inclusive Design in “A Conversation on the Future of Physician Assisted Death”.

Registration required at : http://goo.gl/forms/4Mpp3ouvYe

Update: Panelist Bio’s – A Conversation on the Future of Physician Assisted Dying in Canada

Fast Company magazine has published an article detailing Microsoft’s adoption of inclusive design as part of an ongoing metamorphosis at the software company. According to the article:

The big idea is that in order to build machines that adapt to humans better, there needs to be a more robust process for watching how humans adapt to each other, and to their world. “The point isn’t to solve for a problem,” such as typing when you’re blind, said Holmes. “We’re flipping it.” They are finding the expertise and ingenuity that arises naturally, when people are forced to live a life differently from most.”

Jutta Treviranus, Director of the IDRC, also gets mentioned in the article for her role in defining inclusive design, and ultimately paving the way for mainstream organizations adopt inclusive design as a new approach to design and business.

Source: “Microsoft’s Radical Bet On A New Type Of Design Thinking“, Fast Company Magazine.

Update: Added Open Education Global 2016 Conference.

IDRC Director Jutta Treviranus will be speaking at the following conferences on topics crossing digital inclusion in education, to rethinking the role of technology in our institutions.

March 2016:

• March 15, University of Manitoba. “Information and communication accessibility”.

April 2016:

• April 12 – WWW2016 Workshop on Web Science and Technology for Education (WWW2016 Montreal). “Evaluating Educational Software in the Web Era”.
• April 12 – W4A Conference (WWW2016 Montreal). “Life-Long Learning on the Inclusive Web”.
  • Conference paper – “Life-Long Learning on the Inclusive Web“.
• April 13 – Edu-Fiction (WWW2016 Montreal). “What will the web bring [in 2030]?”
• April 14 – Open Education Global 2016. “[Action Lab] Salad dressing, pendula, navels, scraped knees and future-proof learning (Accessibility and OER)”.
• April 29 – OCULA Spring Conferece. “Creating Space: Expanding the Physical, Digital, and Mental Boundaries of the Academic Library”

May 2016:

• May 12 to 14 – UNIversal Inclusion Rights and Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities in the Academic Conext
  • The information about this conference is also available in this accessible PDF: http://en.unito.it/sites/sten/files/universal_inclusion.pdf
• May 26 – Think Conference

Visit the conference websites for individual times and details.

The paper titled “The Future Challenge of the ADA: Shaping Humanity’s Transformation”, authored by Jutta Treviranus, has been published and included in the Volume 4, Issue 1 (March 2016) Inclusion journal. The paper outlines the many growing challenges of the ADA as technology, economics, and demographics radically shift.