Latest news with #disabilities
CTV News
11 hours ago
- General
- CTV News
Sudbury high school students celebrate milestones
Northern Ontario Watch On Thursday, some students with disabilities in Sudbury celebrated the completion of a work training program at Pioneer Manor.
CNA
20 hours ago
- Business
- CNA
Nominations for 7th edition of Goh Chok Tong Enable Awards open till Jun 25
Nominations for an awards programme that recognises persons with disabilities with significant achievements or have shown great promise are closing in less than a week. The Goh Chok Tong Enable Awards is a joint initiative by Mediacorp and SG Enable. It is held every year and it is in its seventh run. Michael Ngu, Chairman of the Goh Chok Tong Enable Awards Evaluation Panel and Board Member of SG Enable, discusses his award-winning journey and how he became a judge. He also talks about how the selection process works and what the judges are looking out for.
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Business
- Irish Times
‘It feels like home to me': Mr Price staff demonstrate value of employing disabled people
Despite finishing his third-level education at a time of full employment, Karl Kavanagh (23) didn't think he'd 'ever' get a job. 'I thought I'd go to college and then it would be, 'See you after' for me. I thought it would be hard to get a job. I thought I'd be looking for ages.' He had just completed a three-year programme at the National Learning Network, which supports people with disabilities. His lecturer suggested he apply to the discount retailer Mr Price. 'They gave me a day to try out – packing the shelves and helping customers. Then, they gave me a call to say they had a job offer for me.' Three years on, he is still with the retailer's Coolock, Dublin branch. READ MORE 'I am dealing with customers, making sure they are okay, that they have everything they need ... I like the environment and the team. The team is very good. We all get on really well. We have fun.' Séadna O'Hara (25), a retail assistant in the Blanchardstown branch, was 'so surprised' to be offered a job after graduating last year from Trinity College Dublin's centre for people with intellectual disabilities. 'In my work I am doing pricing, doing the baskets and the tills. It is pretty good work,' he says. 'Some of it can be pretty complex ... It can be a bit challenging if someone wants to do a refund.' He loves working with the company. 'It feels like home to me,' he says. 'The team are very nice and the customers, because I treat them very well, they smile at the way you treat them.' The young men were among several Mr Price employees at an event hosted by the company on Wednesday, to demonstrate employing disabled people is 'not only possible, but value-adding for the company', said operations manager Edel McSorley. Jack Doyle, who works with Mr Price in Arklow, Co Wicklow, at the event in Dublin on Thursday. Photograph: Damien Eagers/The Irish Times 'Ireland has still one of the lowest employment rates for people with disabilities in Europe. That is an unnecessary reality,' she said. Citing Disability Federation of Ireland data from last year, she said just 33 per cent of disabled people were in employment, compared with the EU average of 51 per cent. In addition, 40 per cent of disabled people here are at risk of poverty. Ms McSorley has championed employing disabled people since she started with the company in 2011. Now 17 per cent of its workforce are drawn from the cohort. Minister for Social Protection Dara Calleary, attending the event, said it was 'just not acceptable' that Ireland had one of the highest disabled unemployment rates in the EU. He urged employers to explore available supports to employ disabled people, and to 'take the leap'. He said 'harm' was being done to disabled people by the barriers they faced in all aspects of their lives. [ How to ensure your workplace works for people with disabilities Opens in new window ] 'What Mr Price has done is a signal to every other employer that this works.' While employers and workers won when more disabled people were in their workforce, the 'biggest winner is society'. Disability was 'a huge focus' for Government and his department, he continued. A cross-departmental national disability strategy (NDS), led by the Taoiseach, was being finalised. Asked if all employers should be set disability employment targets (public sector employers have been set a target of 6 per cent by the end of the year), Mr Calleary said he wanted to 'work on the carrot first'. 'If companies are not employing people with disabilities they are missing out on extraordinary skills, talent that will add so much to [their] workplace.' Asked what life would be like he did not have his job, Mr O'Hara said: 'I would feel a little left out. I would be sad.'
BBC News
2 days ago
- Automotive
- BBC News
Driving instructor says he has changed lessons due to potholes
A driving instructor has said he has had to change the way he teaches his students due to the amount of potholes in the Whitburn, 58, has operated a driving school in Nottinghamshire for 16 years, but has said he has noticed learner drivers' anxiety rise as the number of potholes have said he now avoids roads covered in potholes with some students who "refuse" to drive down them and has had to start teaching how motorists can tackle cratered streets safely."I spend more and more time teaching students about them," he added. "The roads have got so much worse over the past ten years - before, we barely spoke about potholes, now, my students always bring them up. "Lots of students panic about them as they see other drivers suddenly swerve away from them without looking and so on."They are concerned about damage to the vehicle, but in avoiding them, they may strike the curb, get too close to other cars or put nearby cyclists at risk."I teach them to observe the situation and only swerve out of the way if it's safe, otherwise, there is no option but to go through them." Mr Whitburn also teaches learner drivers with disabilities, for whom he says potholes pose added difficulties."When a vehicle shakes as it goes over a pothole, these clients find it even more difficult to control the car and their steering," he said."We go through them and deal with them, but it should not be this much of a hazard."You can always expect to see a few, but on some roads you can see between 20 - 30. That just is not acceptable." Mr Whitburn said he has spent had £1,000 on repairs to his car caused by potholes over the last 14 months and had one student suffer a blowout during a lesson. He added: "Myself and the student discussed the pothole on approach - to which he said - "what pothole?"He was, unfortunately, too late."I only swerve or steer the wheel out of the way if we are in an emergency. Having to do that knocks students confidence."Mr Whitburn said there are a number of road riddled with potholes on his patch - and highlighted Digby Avenue, Mapperley, as a particular problem, as it is on a test said: "Digby Avenue is already near a school and lots of parked cars, and when the potholes are everywhere, it's really hard to be safe. "Your car shakes so is almost comical." The government has announced £1.6bn funding for national road repairs and the Department for Transport (DFT) has warned English councils they will be ranked according to their process in fixing potholes.A Nottinghamshire County Council highways manager said: "We actively monitor the condition of all roads in Nottinghamshire through routine inspections and reports of defects we receive from residents and road users. "We're pleased to say that 40 sites in the district are due to benefit from road/footway resurfacing or surface treatments."Where residents notice potholes, we ask that they continue to report them to us either through our website or the MyNOTTS App."
Forbes
3 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Accessibility In 2025: Forces, Finance, And The Future
After decades of halting advances, the field of Accessibility for people with disabilities has reached not a fork in one road—it's smack in the middle of a bustling (and often contentious) convergence of many forces from many directions. There are imperatives from legal and moral to societal and financial. Disabilities physical, sensory and cognitive. Politics and profit. Them, me. All crashing into each other in ways never seen before. There is little consensus on where accessibility will emerge from all this. But if experts agree on anything, it's that the business community will play a significant role. Progress will rely on good, old-fashioned entrepreneurship and investment in AI-driven communication devices, exoskeletons, consumer products and much more. 'Accessibility has been an ignored space from investment capital,' says Paul Kent, the managing partner of the Disabled Life Alliance, which connects and facilitates deals between private investors and innovators in the accessibility space. 'It's been thought of as a small market, which is ridiculous. There's a massive return associated with this. A lot of people believe social impact requires less than market-rate returns. But that's not true. This is not charity. It's an investible market.' Forbes' inaugural Accessibility 100 list gives a unique look at the industry as it stands today, and where it's headed. The list features the top innovators and impact-makers—from large companies to lone inventors—in sectors like mobility, communication, sports, entertainment and many more. Some make devices like 'smart canes' that can tell blind users where things are, from poles to the Starbucks entrance; while others build playgrounds for disabled children, or provide access from everything to the beach, the ballot box and a career in modeling. Profiles of all 100 appear on pages devoted to those categories; for example, education is here. Featuring companies and people from 15 countries, the list was compiled through more than 400 conversations with industry insiders over nine months, and with the guidance of an expert advisory board. Disabilities considered include physical, sensory and neurodivergent; types of accessibility include digital (technology, websites and so on), physical (access to public transportation and buildings) and experiences (sports, careers and the like). Emphasis was placed on breadth of impact felt now and expected in the near future. This page details the list's methodology and advisory board. Current debates over DEI (often called DEIA, the A for accessibility) often overlook one dynamic: the disabled community is the one minority which anyone of any race, gender, age or financial means can suddenly find themselves thrust into. The head of accessibility at a major communications company, who asked not to be identified given the current political climate, calls accessibility a 'casualty of war' over DEI policies—such as when the Trump administration stopped providing sign-language interpretation during broadcasts of press briefings, cutting them off to deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens. (The National Association of the Deaf immediately sued.) Likewise, stricter protections for disabled airline travelers instituted by the previous administraion—such as reimbursement for wheelchair damage and better training for flight personnel to increase safety—have been opposed by the airline industry, which is now seeking to delay, dilute, or remove them altogether. As such conflicts play out, companies and entrepreneurs currently changing the world of accessibility are, in ways surprisingly new, inviting people with all disabilities into design conversations and testing labs, heeding the community's mantra, 'Nothing about us without us.' Recently, as sign-language robotic hands were hailed by outsiders as possibly replacing expensive interpreters—a certainly worthwhile goal—the enthusiasm has obscured the reality that they didn't really serve the deaf and hard-of-hearing community yet. 'American Sign Language is 70 percent what we call nonverbal markers—it's your face, how your body moves, not just hand shapes,' says Kelby Brick, the chief operating officer of the National Federation of the Deaf. Usable innovation in the area, he suspects, would require AI-driven avatars that can convey that nuance. Not all advancements in accessibility are contentious. Many become universal. Closed captioning—originally designed for the deaf—has grown so ubiquitous that it has became one of many examples of what is now called 'the curb-cut effect,' so named after sloped curbs designed for people with disabilities wound up benefitting everyone, like those pushing strollers or pulling suitcases. Other instances include electric toothbrushes, speech-to-text and even bendable straws. Indeed, the preferred approach for many companies has become 'universal design,' where products and services are built from the start to serve everyone, rather than winding up immediately unusable by the disabled or clumsily retrofitted after the fact. Several firms, including Accessibility 100 listmakers Deque and Fable, now produce software that checks computer code as it's written to ensure that accessibility features work out of the box. OXO, also on the list, is a household name (literally) that designs all of its kitchen products to be easy for everyone, from smooth-turning can openers to tongs that close with one hand. One distinct feature of accessibility innovation is that companies—even direct competitors—enthusiastically share ideas and advances, even code, to hasten innovation for all. For example, Procter & Gamble invented raised icons that blind and low-vision people can feel to distinguish products like liquid soap, shampoo and laundry detergent from each other; the company is sharing them with others to make them standard. 'We're not just trying to do it alone,' says Sam Latif, P&G's Company Accessibility Leader. 'Doing it on a few products is not as impactful as the industry doing it together.' Apple operating systems have built accessibility features into its software since the 1980s, but when Steve Jobs insisted that the first iPhone have no buttons—making it almost unusable for blind people—it sparked faster and faster feature innovations, like haptic feedback, screen magnification, suppression of flashing content and hundreds more. There are so many, in fact, that Apple recently introduced App Store 'Accessibility Nutrition Labels' to let users know how each app serves their specific disability. 'It makes good business sense to make technology that works for everyone—we mean everyone,' says Sarah Herrlinger, Apple's top accessibility official. 'Accessibility is some of the most creative work we do.'
