A pair of recent newspaper articles about helping more people with disabilities enter the workforce shows not just how employment helps make life matter more for these individuals, but also the bottom-line benefits for the community they live in and America as a whole. Finding employment for even a small fraction of people with disabilities [...]
We conclude our series with a look at the 50,000 euro grand prize winner and runner-ups in the Social Participation category at the 2012 Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards. Vodafone, one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of mobile phone technology, launched the first competition last year with the help of the European Disability Forum and AGE [...]
The winning app in the Independent Living category of the 2012 Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards was also the most highly-rated entry of the entire competition, according to one of the judges, Stuart Dredge, in his recap for The Guardian‘s Apps Blog. One look at the amount of content it puts at the fingertips of people [...]
Hope everyone had a nice Christmas Day with their loved ones. We pick up on Monday’s review of the 2012 Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards with a look at the winning entry and two runner-ups in the Mobility category. Obviously, Mobility apps are right in the wheelhouse of smartphone technology developers. When you’re out of [...]
Augmentative communication between parents and children with autism, an updatable resource for accessible facilities in public spaces, keyword searches that are automatically adapted to accommodate a user, and a device for teaching smartphone technologies to people with disabilities were the four apps that earned first prize in the 2012 Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility awards, announced [...]
Vertex is building a new drug manufacturing facility on its Cambridge campus, citing the competitive advantage of insourcing its production versus sending jobs overseas in a December 14 article for the online business and technology publication, Xconomy. In “Build It In the Back Yard: Why We Need American Manufacturing,” Brian Patrick Quinn constructs a scenario [...]
A combination of economic growth and aging workforce should lead to 100,000 job openings in Massachusetts’ manufacturing operations over the next decade, according to a new report. This article in the December 2 edition of the Gloucester Daily Times reports on the first meeting of a group of Massachusetts executives, experts, and officials called the [...]
James Fallows’ article, “Mr. China Comes to America” is the second of two in-depth examinations of U.S. manufacturing using offshore labor found in the December issue of The Atlantic. Like his counterpart, Charles Fishman, Fallows sees outsourcing to Americans as a growing trend for the manufacturing sector. In his vision of the future, the resurgence [...]
Two articles in the December 2012 issue of The Atlantic magazine find positive signs that manufacturing jobs could be returning to America after years of being outsourced to other countries. It’s a trend that could result in more employment opportunities for people with disabilities through contract service work or full-time employment. Charles Fishman spends a [...]
Last week’s 12-12-12 concert in New York City’s Madison Square Garden was the latest effort to help recovery efforts on the eastern seaboard in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. Reuters reported that pre-show ticket sales and sponsorships had raised $32 million even before a single note was played by Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Alicia Keys, [...]