(University of Hawaii)
The University of Hawaii in Manoa was awarded a $425,000 grant by the Kessler Foundation to develop a virtual reality (VR) employment orientation and support center using Second Life as a platform for people with disabilities and employers. The university’s College of Education Center on Disability Studies (CDS) will receive a Kessler Signature Employment Grant to develop EmployAble: A World Without Barriers that provides provide training, networking, mentoring, and employment resources.
EmployAble will be developed by a team of researchers and developers, many of whom have disabilities. Collaborators are expected to include Virtual Ability, the virtual reality site for disabled people, and Abilicorp, an employment firm for placing people with disabilities in jobs.
The developers anticipate EmployAble will simulate social interactions in the work place and demonstrate commonly used assistive technologies, such as screen readers, captioning video programs, accessible document creation, presentation programs with accessible features (e.g., VoiceThread, Adobe Flash), and text-to-speech software. The foundation says EmployAble will draw on components of commercial VR software programs such as Multiple User Virtual Environments, Second Life, and Virtual World Simulation.
The project is expected to target veterans with traumatic brain injury, who often have difficulty finding and maintaining employment due to the complex nature of their disabilities. “People with disabilities are employed at a significantly lower rate than people without disabilities, says the project’s principal investigator Steven Brown, “and these numbers are frankly unacceptable.”
The Kessler Foundation’s two-year Signature Employment Grants fund pilot initiatives, demonstration projects, and social ventures that can lead to new ideas to solve unemployment and underemployment of individuals with disabilities.
Read more: University Builds Virtual-Reality Factory Simulation
* * *
RSS - Posts
You must be logged in to post a comment.