This week 30 years ago, legislation expanding the rights of Americans with Disabilities was enacted. To mark this historic event, we have invited a panel of eminent speakers, all blind, to share their thoughts, predictions and wish-lists for the next 30 years of the ADA. This is a chance to celebrate all the ADA has opened the door to achieving, and it’s a chance to hear peoples’ ideas on how it must change and how it should be expanded to better serve blind people and people with intersecting disabilities for the next three decades or more.
This promises to be a lively discussion, with a chance for comments and questions from the community.
Panel Speakers
Jim Barbour
Jim, who attended the University of Colorado, has built a 30-year career as a Computer Systems Engineer, including working at Google, Qualcomm, and Yahoo. He does extensive volunteer work as a community organizer and holds several board positions in the National Federation of the Blind. He is currently working to keep blind people in the San Francisco Bay Area connected during the pandemic through social calls and providing information on advocacy and community resources.
Chancey Fleet
Chancey is one of our own: becoming the newest member of the LightHouse board in 2019. In her day job, Chancey is an Assistive Technology Coordinator at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library at the New York Public Library. One of her initiatives in this position is to work with institutions like the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute to teach people who are blind or have low vision to learn programming code. She also does a lot of work in the arena of translating spatial concepts into tactile form.
Justice Shorter
Justice is a Disaster Protection Advisor at the National Disability Rights Network. While earning her Master’s in Sustainable Development: International Policy & Management, Justice authored three separate inclusion guides for the U.S. State Department and produced multiple people-centered projects via internships with The Hunger Project, World Learning and Women Enabled International. Justice also interned within the White House Office of Public Engagement & Intergovernmental Affairs where she focused on disability outreach efforts, social inclusion policies and federal agency engagement.
When: Friday July 31 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. via Zoom.
To RSVP and receive the Zoom details for this one-off event, please email Andrea Vecchione at AVecchione@lighthouse-sf.org.
