Announcement: Virtual Ability Presents The International Disability Rights Affirmation Conference (IDRAC) on Friday, Nov 15

 

Virtual Ability, Inc.® presents the 13th Annual International Disability Rights Affirmation Conference (IDRAC) on Friday, Nov 15, 2024.

This annual professional conference will be held online, and is free and open to the public.

The conference will take place in Second Life® at The Sojourner Auditorium on Virtual Ability Island.Virtual Ability (54/170/23) 

The conference will also be Live Streamed on YouTube.

Our theme this year is “Disability & Health: Where will AI take us?” Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an area of current research interest and regulatory concern. It holds both promise and peril for people with disabilities and healthcare in general. The utility and problems of AI differ for people with different types of disabilities. This conference offers a quick look at this broad topic. We expect lively discussions and information sharing among presenters and our very interested and interactive audience.

 

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The events start at 7 AM SL time and end soon before 12 Noon. 

 

To see the schedule, Click Here. 

 

Announcement: Virtual Ability IDRAC Conference This Friday

 Save the Date- Oct 28 IDRAC 

Virtual Ability's annual International Disability Rights Affirmation Conference is a free public professional conference. This year's conference is on Friday, October 28, in the Sojourner Auditorium on Virtual Ability island. The theme of the conference is "Access to Justice."

The impetus behind Virtual Ability's conferences is to provide professional-level information to the general public in a highly accessible format. Most of us would never get to hear from and interact with these researchers and other experts outside of Second Life!

You can see the conference schedule and more about the speakers here: https://virtualability.org/idrac-2022/

Presenters at this year's conference range from a lawyer talking about how "typical" employment hours are discriminatory,  to a student investigating the fairness of AI hiring software; from a retired professor who became a disability ally, to a physical therapist who has written children's books featuring a dog with an amputated leg who deals with discrimination and bullying.

Additionally, several of the poster sets on Healthinfo Island address topics related to Access to Justice. These you can visit any time during the month of October. Be sure to click each poster for additional information and live links. You can get a notecard containing all the text (posters + click text) plus image descriptions by clicking the entrance poster.

We hope you can attend the IDRAC conference on October 28. If you (your avatar) can't attend live in Second Life, you can watch the conference live stream on Virtual Ability's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/VirtualAbilityInc

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Virtual%20Ability/54/170/23

 

Press Release: 2019 IDRAC Schedule

This year’s annual IDRAC conference will be held on Friday and Saturday, November 1 and 2. It has the theme “We help each other, we help ourselves.”
Read about the conference here: https://virtualability.org/idrac-2019/

The conference is held in the Sojourner Auditorium on Virtual Ability island.
The SLURL is http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Virtual%20Ability/54/170/23

Here is the schedule.

NOTE All times are given as SLT or Second Life Time, which is the same as Pacific time in California. You should use a converter such as https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter-classic.html to confirm your local time.

FRIDAY
7 am SLT Mari Kimura (PCORI)
“The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI): Mission and Successes”
8:30 am SLT Arleen Ionescu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) and Anne-Marie Callus (University of Malta)
"Reading the Personal and the Social in Disability Studies and Trauma Studies"
10 am SLT Catalin Brylla (University of West London)
“Disability and Media Representation”
11:30 am SLT Frederic Fovet (Royal Roads University)
“UDL in Higher Ed: Shifting access from the remedial to the proactive”
1 pm SLT Nohemi Lugo, Maria Elena Melon, Maria Concepcion Castillo (Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico)
“The representation of autism in the narratives of fanfiction.net: Affinity spaces as an opportunity for the negotiation of meaning”

SATURDAY
6:30 am SLT panel “Hearing Our Voices” with Alyssa Hillary (blogger and advocate), Rob Castellanos (Syndio Health) and Kirk Munsch (Rare Patient Voice)
8 am SLT showing and discussion of the video “The Bench”
9 am SLT Fleur Heleen Boot (Radboud University Medical Centre, the Netherlands)
"Which factors influence access to assistive products for people with intellectual disabilities?"
10:30 am SLT Sunil Deepak (AIFO, Italy)
"Challenges and Opportunities in Community-based Rehabilitation and Emancipatory Disability Research"
Noon SLT Katherine Breward (University of Winnipeg)
"Disability Accommodation and Intersectional Identities: Evidence for Differential Requesting and Accommodation Rates"
1:30 pm SLT Lydia X. Z. Brown (advocate)
"The Autistic People of Color Fund: Building Networks of Mutual Aid by/for Negatively Racialized Autistic People"

Press Release: Virtual Ability's Annual International Disability Rights Affirmation Conference, October 5 and 6

This year Virtual Ability will hold its annual International Disability Rights Affirmation Conference on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 5 and 6. The theme of this year's conference is "Taking Care of Us."

We are very excited about the presenters we will have this year.

One is from the United Nations (he will speak at 8:30am SLT on Friday). Another is an Emmy award winning filmmaker (he presents Friday at 11:30am SLT). And on Saturday at 11am SLT, we will interview a Section Editor for the New York Times.

Our presenters are from Hong Kong, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, the UK, Ghana and Mauritius as well as the US, so it's a truly international group of presenters. You can see the full schedule here: http://virtualability.org/idrac-2018/

Questions? You can email me (gentle@virtualability.org) or IM Gentle Heron.

Thank you kindly.