EBU Member's Newsletter

All the news from our ongoing campaigns including the Marrakesh Treaty, European Accessibility Act, reform of EU electoral law, the Equal Treatment Directive, the Web Accessibility Directive, the European Disability Platform,and miscellaneous events.

Welcome back to the 34th episode of the EBU Access Cast where, as always, we provide you with the news around assistive technology and accessibility. This episode, hosted by Paweł and co-hosted by Tanja, Mario and Hlynur contains big amounts of news from the Big companies out there, impressions of technology we have ourselves tested and a nice demo at the end so tune in and enjoy!

Under the global theme “Orange the World: End Violence against Women Now!” the United Nations marks the start of 16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence. The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women commemoration reminds us we all have a role to play to achieve a brighter future free from violence.

The official UN commemoration event took place on November 24.

A video on Equal Right to Work, a rights-reporting podcast, news of the forthcoming event in 2022, and much more!

Following on from last month’s news that EBU published the Belgrade Declaration, 2021, after our conference on employment, we can now inform members that the Declaration has been translated and is now also available in Albanian, Estonian, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Montenegrin and Spanish.

In 2021, DBSV participated in the European Blind Union‘s (EBU) Gender Equality Awareness Raising (GEAR) project with funding from the European Union. As part of the project, an action plan was formulated to promote the representation of women within DBSV. The DBSV Board of Directors unanimously adopted this plan on October 9, 2021 in Bielefeld.

On October 19, ACAPO participated in the public hearing on the study of the early retirement scheme for persons with disabilities. This has been one of ACAPO's oldest claims that still remains unfulfilled 10 years after it came to Parliament for discussion.

How changes in our streets and vehicles are affecting the lives of blind and partially sighted people.

The following article from the BAA offers an insight into the possibilities and uses of the abacus as a learning tool for the visually impaired community.

The abacus is generally regarded by some special educators as the best all-around computing device available to students with visual impairments in East Asia and the United States. It has been used widely in their education systems. “The abacus is the best computing device for students with visual impairments to learn arithmetic” Dr. Lin, Ching-Jen said, the Director of the Center of Education and Rehabilitation for the Visually Impaired, National University of Tainan in Taiwan.