CSUN 2015
Contributed by Joel Zimba, Special Projects Coordinator, MDTAP
During the first week of March, MDTAP staff attended the 30th Annual International Conference on People with Disabilities. Everyone in the know seems to simply call it “CSUN,” referring to Cal State North Ridge.
CSUN brings together thousands of participants from around the world. It would be impossible to attend all of the hundreds of conference sessions, and nearly impossible to explore the vast exhibit hall. CSUN becomes an overwhelming “choose your own adventure” experience.
Each of the conference tracks could easily be their own separate conference. Policy and legal covers international standards all the way down to court rulings and new agency policies. Education might acquaint you with the challenges of new standardized testing or new approaches for teaching math to blind college students. Then there is technology, which includes the latest offerings from assistive technology vendors to Microsoft introducing the new accessibility features of Windows 10. There is more than enough for everyone and then some.
Of the vast array of exhibits, three quarters of them featured vision-related assistive technology. Every vendor had something newer, smaller or faster. That said, there are certainly emerging trends. Products from book readers to glasses that are sprouting cameras which can read printed text or even recognize faces. Everything is going mobile and connecting to the cloud. In short, many of the technologies we have mentioned on the MDTAP BLOG, “Where It’s AT,” are maturing into products that are making their way to market.
Perhaps the most valuable part of CSUN is rubbing elbows with the best and brightest in nearly all fields related to disabilities. I have no doubt many of the projects and products discussed at this year’s CSUN were first imagined during an after-hours discussion in previous years.
In the future, I might demonstrate a device in our Assistive Technology library which I first saw at CSUN. Perhaps I discussed it’s pros and cons with the engineers. And my feedback may have been useful in shaping the final product. That’s the AT life cycle. It starts, in the early Spring, far away from the ice and snow, at CSUN.
