Growing up, I tried many different sports and hobbies: soccer, tee ball, swim team, drama club, dance classes, and 4-H. I even tried my hand at piano for a number of years.
I had a somewhat typical childhood growing up in Cartagena, Columbia, a port city on the Caribbean Sea, except that I was not allowed to attend school because of my blindness.
"We’ll find out..."
It was a phrase said to me repeatedly by two of my greatest mentors, Fred Sanders and Jim Platt. Almost fifty years later, that phrase seems to pop out of my own mouth with increasing regularity.
If we were to ask a random sample of our sighted friends if a blind person could work at a children’s museum, the majority of those individuals might say no.
Music therapy, like blindness, is very misunderstood. As a blind student in a field in which disabled people are just starting to become the helpers rather than solely the recipients of help, I've needed to find my own solutions to many complicated problems.
With the unemployment rate for the blind hovering around 70 percent, the National Federation of the Blind Employment Committee is dedicated to providing resources and information to help the blind become gainfully employed.
Since its inception in 1936, the federal Randolph-Sheppard program has become the most effective government employment program for the blind. Today some one thousand blind entrepreneurs operate businesses on federal property throughout the United States, ranging from full-service restaurants and cafeterias to vending machine stocking and maintenance operations.
This paper sets forth the position of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) with respect to the proposed addition to Title V of the Rehabilitation Act, known hereinafter as Section 511, contained in the draft reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act recently reported favorably by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
Yesterday was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which is a monumental piece of legislation for most American workers. The FLSA provides for the payment of a federal minimum wage, which is now $7.25 per hour, to every American citizen.
Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act exempts over three thousand employers from paying their workers with disabilities the federal minimum wage, allowing them to pay workers subminimum wages as low as three cents per hour. The Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities Act of 2013 will repeal this unfair, discriminatory, and immoral provision.