Canadian Assistive Technology Ltd.

Canadian Assistive Technology Ltd. We provide the best technologies and the highest level of service and support for our clients Accessibility is our specialty.

At Canadian Assistive Technology, we strive to provide our clients that suffer from Low Vision or Blindness the best solutions available. With over 30 years experience in the field of Assistive Technology, we ensure that the right solution at the right price is always the priority. Visit us online at www.canasstech.com!

Welcome, Accessible Data: How Top Tech Tidbits' Newest Sponsor Is Showing the World What an Accessible Survey Actually L...
06/04/2026

Welcome, Accessible Data: How Top Tech Tidbits' Newest Sponsor Is Showing the World What an Accessible Survey Actually Looks Like | By Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher, Top Tech Tidbits | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://toptechtidbits.com/jerry-nicholson-accessible-surveys/

Top Tech Tidbits Publisher Aaron Di Blasi welcomes Accessible Data, the London-based, IDA-co-designed, UN-trusted survey platform led by co-founder and CEO Jerry Nicholson, to the Top Tech Tidbits Sponsor family. He walks readers through what makes their work different from every survey tool that has ever made you want to close the tab, who already trusts them with the data that shapes policy, and how Dr. Kirk Adams brought Jerry into the Top Tech Tidbits orbit.

Inside Accessible Surveys, the respondent, not the survey author, chooses how every question is presented: sign-language video per question, Easy Read mode, voice-note answers, and screen-reader-optimized markup, all targeting WCAG 2 AAA. The International Disability Alliance, UNICEF Innocenti, the United Nations, the New Zealand Ministry of Transport, and the Inter-American Development Bank are already using it for the research that shapes policy. Accessible Data's sponsorship of Top Tech Tidbits formally begins Monday, May 21, 2026, and helps keep this newsletter free to read for more than 46,000 readers each Thursday.

Scribe for TVIs: Free Document Accessibility for K-12 Educators | By Mike Calvo, CEO, Pneuma Solutions | Courtesy of the...
06/04/2026

Scribe for TVIs: Free Document Accessibility for K-12 Educators | By Mike Calvo, CEO, Pneuma Solutions | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://pneumasolutions.com/ScribeForTVIs

Here, Mike Calvo, co-founder and CEO of Pneuma Solutions and a blind Cuban-American entrepreneur who never graduated high school himself, announces the relaunch of Scribe for Education as Scribe for TVIs: a no-cost program built specifically for K-12 Teachers of the Visually Impaired. Framed as a 'for us, by us' response to a moment when funding is unpredictable and support systems are getting shaky, the program puts a fully accessible document-remediation pipeline directly in the hands of the educators most directly serving blind students through that uncertainty.

Upload any document and Scribe returns it in seconds as screen-reader-ready HTML, BRF braille (Grade 1, Grade 2, UEB, and Nemeth), large print, EPUB, DAISY (transferable to an NLS Talking Book Machine), or MP3 audio. The engine supports 140+ document languages, 30+ braille codes, math detection with MathML, and roughly 96% automated accuracy, with human remediation available on a 72-hour turnaround when a document needs a higher bar. Qualified K-12 TVIs with a valid school email can apply at https://pneumasolutions.com/ScribeForTVIs, annual re-verification keeps the program focused on the educators it was built for.

A New Website, a Redesigned Archive: 2008 to 2026: 19 Years of Access Technology News Now At Your Fingertips | By Aaron ...
06/04/2026

A New Website, a Redesigned Archive: 2008 to 2026: 19 Years of Access Technology News Now At Your Fingertips | By Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher, Top Tech Tidbits | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://toptechtidbits.com/ttt-archives-now-public/

Here, Aaron Di Blasi, publisher for the Top Tech Tidbits weekly newsletter, announces that the full Top Tech Tidbits newsletter archive is now publicly available on the redesigned WordPress.com website at https://toptechtidbits.com/newsletters/. Every weekly issue from January 2008 to today is live and browsable in one place, by year, a 19-year span that, until now, stopped at 2018 on the public-facing site. The newly restored 10 additional calendar years (about 520 weekly issues) cover access technology news, tips, walk-throughs, sponsor announcements, and industry coverage from 2008 through 2017.

Aaron walks readers through the two-phase migration story, beginning with the December 4, 2025 launch on WordPress.com at Volume 1044 and continuing through several months of patient work to bring the older issues forward as legacy archive pages. He explains what readers will find inside, addresses the new archive index page's WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility conformance, and speaks directly to three audiences (readers, Sponsors and Advertisers, Supporters, and the wider access technology community) about why the expanded archive matters to each. The full archive is searchable, screen-reader-friendly, and lives at https://toptechtidbits.com/newsletters/.

Top Tech Tidbits for Thursday, June 4, 2026 - Volume 1070 | By Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher | Courtesy of The PWD Media Co-...
06/04/2026

Top Tech Tidbits for Thursday, June 4, 2026 - Volume 1070 | By Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher | Courtesy of The PWD Media Co-Op
https://toptechtidbits.com/newsletter-06-04-2026/

♿️ The Week's News in Access Technology
A Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd. Publication


Top Tech Tidbits. The world's #1 online resource for current news and trends in access technology.

Subscribers: 46,401 🔢️ subscribers were sent this issue via email.
Social Media: 190,416 🔢️ readers were sent this issue via social media. Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-op.

Top Tech Tidbits is the world's leading not-for-profit access technology publication that reaches over 45,000 blind, low vision, deaf, hard of hearing, deafblind, neurodivergent and/or disabled professionals, educators and enthusiasts, all over the world, each week.

Attention Sponsors: Past, Present and Future: Access Information News Now Provides Verified Quarterly Audience Insight R...
06/03/2026

Attention Sponsors: Past, Present and Future: Access Information News Now Provides Verified Quarterly Audience Insight Reports via LinkedIn Matched Audiences | By Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher | Courtesy of The PWD Media Co-Op
https://accessinformationnews.com/announcing-audience-insights/

Here, Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher for the Access Information News weekly newsletter, announces the launch of independent, LinkedIn-verified Audience Insight reports, an answer to the question Sponsors have been asking him for nearly two decades across both Top Tech Tidbits (founded 2004) and its sibling publication Access Information News (spun off in November 2022): who, exactly, reads these publications each week? On May 15, 2026, the publication uploaded a hashed copy of its email list to LinkedIn Matched Audiences. LinkedIn matched 38,123 of approximately 44,851 subscribers against active member profiles, an 85% match rate well above LinkedIn's published 30-60% B2B baseline. The new Audience Insights page publishes twelve full demographic panels (top job functions, seniority, industries, employers, geography, skills, and content interests) drawn from those verified profiles, with quarterly regenerations on the calendar to give Sponsors a continuing third-party view of audience composition over time.

The article also recaps the engagement context Sponsors haven't been imagining, with a 12-month rolling 47% open rate and 34% click rate against all-industry email-marketing averages of 16.22% and 7.17%. Sponsorship now includes membership in the PWD Media Distribution Co-op (42+ partner channels reaching 189,000+ BLV/PWD readers per post), and the Audience Insights reports themselves are WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessible across the four compliance regimes that govern the underlying subscriber list (CAN-SPAM, CASL, GDPR, PECR). Aaron is explicit that the editorial voting panel that decides what runs each week is independent of the commercial relationship, by design and without exception.

Attention Sponsors: Past, Present and Future: Top Tech Tidbits Now Provides Verified Quarterly Audience Insight Reports ...
06/03/2026

Attention Sponsors: Past, Present and Future: Top Tech Tidbits Now Provides Verified Quarterly Audience Insight Reports via LinkedIn Matched Audiences | By Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher | Courtesy of The PWD Media Co-Op
https://toptechtidbits.com/announcing-audience-insights/

Here, Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher for the Top Tech Tidbits weekly newsletter, announces the launch of independent, LinkedIn-verified Audience Insight reports, an answer to the question Sponsors have been asking him for nearly two decades: who, exactly, reads Top Tech Tidbits each week? On May 15, 2026, the publication uploaded a hashed copy of its email list to LinkedIn Matched Audiences. LinkedIn matched 38,910 of 45,776 subscribers against active member profiles, an 85% match rate well above LinkedIn's published 30-60% B2B baseline. The new Audience Insights page publishes twelve full demographic panels (top job functions, seniority, industries, employers, geography, skills, and content interests) drawn from those verified profiles, with quarterly regenerations on the calendar to give Sponsors a continuing third-party view of audience composition over time.

The article also recaps the engagement context Sponsors haven't been imagining, with a 12-month rolling 46% open rate and 42% click rate against technology-sector industry averages of 9.65% and 7.68%. Sponsorship now includes membership in the PWD Media Distribution Co-op (42+ partner channels reaching 189,000+ BLV/PWD readers per post), and the Audience Insights reports themselves are WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessible across the four compliance regimes that govern the underlying subscriber list (CAN-SPAM, CASL, GDPR, PECR). Aaron is explicit that the editorial voting panel that decides what runs each week is independent of the commercial relationship, by design and without exception.

🎙️ Remarkable World Commentary Episode #93: Interview with Dr. Alan Chase, Director, EyeRetreat.org | By Donna J. Jodha...
06/03/2026

🎙️ Remarkable World Commentary Episode #93: Interview with Dr. Alan Chase, Director, EyeRetreat.org | By Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://donnajodhan.com/rwc-05-21-2026/

In this forward-looking episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna welcomes back Dr. Alan Chase, founder of the EYE Retreat, a one-week intensive summer program now in its 19th year, hosted at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in North Carolina, for an update on what's cooking for the 2026 cohort. Alan walks listeners through how a weekend gathering of about 15 students has grown into a packed week-and-a-half program serving roughly 40 students this summer with a waiting list, staffed entirely by volunteers and funded principally by the Lions Club and the Delta Gamma Foundation. He breaks down the camp's two parallel tracks, a college track that takes students from choosing a school, picking a major, and learning self-advocacy through navigating course catalogs, accommodations, and campus resources, to a final personal-roadmap presentation; and an entrepreneurship track that walks students from generating a business idea, through fine-tuning, business-plan development, and a Shark-Tank-style investor pitch by the end of the week, alongside the dorm-suite living arrangement of four students sharing two rooms and one bathroom that doubles as a real-world classroom in communication, scheduling, and social problem-solving.

What gives this conversation its larger weight, however, is the through-line of capacity-building. Alan returns repeatedly to the camp's mission of growing the next generation, bringing students back as mentors, then as coordinators responsible for recreation, dorms, and entire tracks, so that leadership skills are forged alongside academic and entrepreneurial ones. Together Donna and Alan name the still-unsolved barriers in the field: the social side of education that academic accommodations alone don't address; the roughly seventy-one-percent unemployment rate among visually impaired adults that Donna cites; the irony that some countries' low official unemployment numbers come from government-set-aside jobs that strip away self-determination; and the rising population of young people with multiple disabilities whose lives are now being saved by medical advances and who deserve every path to independence. Alan closes with his wish that the educational system embrace the whole child, including the nine areas of the Expanded Core Curriculum researchers have identified as essential to independent life, and Donna closes with the news that she will attend the EYE Retreat in person at the end of July for the first time, after participating virtually since 2024.

🎙️ Remarkable World Commentary Episode #92: Interview with Paul Gareau | By Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA | Courtesy ...
06/03/2026

🎙️ Remarkable World Commentary Episode #92: Interview with Paul Gareau | By Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://donnajodhan.com/rwc-05-19-2026/

In this deeply nostalgic episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna welcomes Paul Gareau, retired Executive Director of the Montreal Association for the Blind (MAB) and architect of the 2006 MAB-Mackay merger that became today's Lethbridge-Layton-Mackay Rehabilitation Centre, for a conversation tracing his thirty-year journey from Loyola sociology graduate, to University of Toronto Master of Social Work scholarship student, to the lone social worker for 1,800 students at a Sherbrooke high school, and on into the leadership rooms of one of Canada's most beloved disability-services institutions. Paul walks listeners through residential life at the Penfield Reception Centre, his Concordia Diploma in Institutional Administration earned in night classes while running MAB full-time, and the remarkable breadth of services under his stewardship, from the low-vision clinic, talking-book library, and Gilman Residence to the Philip E. Layton School, the technical-aids boutique, the Employment Integration Program, the Braille production unit, and a service of more than 300 volunteers.

What makes this conversation unforgettable is that it is also a reunion. Paul was once Donna's own social worker and the person who recommended the surgeon Dr. Joel Rosen for her first corneal transplant; Donna herself lived at Penfield for a year and a half at the start of her Montreal journey. Together they recall the late Dr. John Simms, who appeared at her hospital bedside after her 1981 accident; the formidable Irene Lambert, whose voice helped keep right-turn-on-red out of Montreal; lifelong best friend Charlene; and volunteer reader Jill Bond, with whom Donna still travels Europe. The episode closes with Paul's post-retirement strategic-planning consulting and board work with the Pillars Trust Fund, including pandemic-era funding so parishes could stream masses during COVID, and his three enduring lessons: keep your eye on the mission, adjust quickly to changing circumstances, and remember that every challenge carries an opportunity inside it.

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V5Z1E2

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