This is Disability Awareness Week at Hope College. Numerous events are planned, including a wheelchair basketball game between members of Hope’s men’s basketball team and the Grand Rapids Pacers at the Dow Center on Wednesday, April 9th at 7:00. Read more about wheelchair basketball and the National Wheelchair Basketball Association, known for being “every bit as competitive as the NBA,” in a 2005 Sports Illustrated column.
The library’s Disability Resource Room will be open on Thursday, April 10th between 10:00 and 11:00. Stop in to see technologies that assist visually impaired people read printed texts. Among the pieces of equipment in the Disability Resource Room is a Kurzweil Reading Machine. Kurzweil was, and is, a leader in optical character recognition. New technology in this area allows a photo of printed text taken with a cell phone to be translated into spoken words instantaneously. Read more about this new technology in a 2008 article in PC Magazine Online.
For more information on these topics and others related to Disability Awareness Week, please contact the Reference Desk.