The Department of Education’s www.ed.gov new funding opportunity through the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, will total up to $20 million over five years. The funding will provide for a pilot demonstration referred to as the “Automated Personalization Computing Project” (APCP. The objective is to help individuals with disabilities have better access to information technologies through automatic personalization of assistive technology.
The Department of Education is seeking to help individuals with disabilities access communications and information technology on a secure basis no matter where they are located, the kind of computer or the software platform used, or whether desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones are used to transmit data and information.
An information technology infrastructure would be created so that users of information and communication technologies will be able to store preferences in the cloud or use other technology that would support internet-capable devices run on their preferred Assistive Technology (AT) solutions.
The APCP would identify AT to meet the user’s preferences and then configure the computer accordingly. This may require automatically configuring AT built into the mainstream technology computer itself or configuring external AT solutions to operate on the computer.
Eligible applicants must be a State, public, or nonprofit agency or organization, or Indian tribes. This project will require coordination among several different sectors that may include cloud or other technology platform providers, AT researchers and manufacturers, mainstream technology manufacturers, federal agencies, individuals with disabilities, educators, employers, and disability advocacy organizations. The Department requires applicants to establish a partnership or use an existing partnership.
The target population for the pilot project must be to help youths with disabilities transition from secondary to postsecondary education, or target employed individuals with disabilities who are clients of American Job Centers or State vocational rehabilitation agencies.
The information on the funding was made available July 23, 2015 in the Federal Register with the deadline for submission of the application to be September 8, 2015. For more information, contact the Department of Education, Rehabilitation Services Administration at 202-245-6037 or email Douglas Zhu at douglas.zhu@ed.gov.