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Youth Slam has been hosted by the National Federation of the Blind since 2004. This five-day academy engages and inspires high school students who are blind to consider careers falsely believed to be inaccessible to them and bring a unified voice to the next generation of blind professionals. At the 2011 Youth Slam event held in July, Dr. Jeffrey Bigham led a track designed to introduce students to computer science through a project based around navigation with the iPhone.

This past summer, the premiere of two animation shorts (and ) developed by ten students graduating from the 2010 Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf & Hard of Hearing in Computing (Summer Acadamy) was attended by parents, instructors, and community members.

AccessComputing student interns have completed over 120 internships. They have worked on computing projects and research in industry settings, workshops, and labs. They have learned how to request reasonable accommodations, communicate with supervisors and co-workers, collaborate with others, and manage priorities. Their internship experiences have improved their resumes, helped them meet graduation requirements, improved their confidence, and further developed their network of professional contacts.

The national Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in Information Technology (CMD-IT) has been recently established to focus on the following under-represented groups: African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, and people with disabilities. CMD-IT is comprised of corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, and non-profits. Its mission is to ensure that under-represented groups are fully engaged in computing and IT, and to promote innovation that enriches, enhances, and enables these communities.

Do you know which college degrees are in high demand? In a recent survey* the top ten in-demand college degrees reported by respondents are:

The next wave of HTML, called HTML5, is in development by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). HTML5 is an important step for web accessibility, because it is the first time that people with disabilities have been included in the web language development process from the beginning. Two very different cultures are learning how to work together, and it's both exciting and frustrating.

This summer, KUOW (Puget Sound Public Radio) broadcast my interview with Jeannie Yandel. We discussed universal design and its benefit for everyone, including people with disabilities. The segment, "Web Accessibility for Everyone" is no longer available, but the transcript is available at .