By S. Kenneth Shishir

The problems faced by the disabled is gaining more and more importance all over the world. The government of India and also State governments have lent a helping hand to the differently abled by framing various policies like reservation in jobs, concession in traveling, special training institutions etc.

However, a major role is played by the family members who need to fill the affected person with strength to face the world. Here is the story of one such person who has gone beyond his disability and is telling the world “I Can.”

Meet Pandu Ranga Rao, a young entrepreneur who wants to take the world of web and software to new horizons.

Born to Sunanda and Nara-yan Rao couple on Aug. 24, 1975, he was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a disorder of movements, at birth. His brave parents did not lose heart and got him admitted to a normal school.

Speaking to Star of Mysore, Pandu Ranga Rao said that though he completed SSLC with flying colours, it was difficult for him to enter PUC. His mother got him admitted to CPC Polytechnic and he later obtained B.Sc. in Information Technology from KSOU.

After completing his Diploma in Computer Science from CPC Polytechnic, he joined as a Lab Instructor in JSS Polytechnic for Differently Abled in SJCE campus here. While working there, he developed two softwares for JSS Polytechnic and gained vast experience at Excel Soft Technologies.

He says that he is grateful to D. Sudhanva, Managing Director of the company, for his encouragement to develop softwares on his own and added that he never went to any special classes but learnt through the opportunities given at Excel Soft.

Pandu Ranga Rao says that he was humiliated a few times during his education and was frustrated with the experiences in life all because of him being specially abled. He says that he wanted to show the world that people like him can achieve anything and teachers should have an open mind and heart to help students like him.

While working as a Lab Instructor, he came across Yathish, who is also disabled. He involved Yathish in his activities of flash developing and founded the company I Can Technologies which offers services like website development, web hosting, software development and product development.

Inspired by the TV show Kaun Banega Crorepathi, he develo-ped a small programme called Quiz Master for a CD brought out by PC-Quest. He has also developed alerts which act as reminders of scheduled works on the computer desktop.

Pandu Ranga Rao says that he aims to provide jobs to people like him, not because they are disabled, but for their talents. He wants to help them enter into mainstream as they need more opportunities than sympathy.

He says that nothing is impossible and computers bore him to some extent. Smiling, he says he loves travelling.

Pandu Ranga Rao got married to Jyothi of Shimoga in 2011 and she has been supporting him in all his activities.

His mother Sunanda says that she faced a lot of problem in the beginning and it was a young doctor from All India Institute Of Physical Medicine And Rehabilitation, Mumbai, who advised her to admit Pandu Ranga Rao to a normal school. On his advice, she admitted him to a convent at Udupi. The teachers there said that she has to be with her son in the school for a few days as they needed time to study his behaviour.

Sunanda says she enjoyed being with him in the school during his studies. In 1985-86, they shifted to Mysore to provide him speech therapy at AIISH.

Pandu Ranga Rao is presently working from home as he cannot move about on his own.

He was honored by AIISH on World Disability Day in 2006 and won the ‘Achiever Award’ by GSB Bankers Educational and Welfare Trust in 2008 apart from being felicitated during Teachers’ Day celebrations. He says that he is looking for a place to start an enterprise so that he can provide employment to persons like him.

I Can Technologies is presently running its own online tutorial in programming for children who want to be programmers. Product development is the key area of their focus and they will be developing and releasing a product which will target educational institutions. Through this, one can bring the entire student community and all their activities like payment of fees, borrowing of library books, etc. under one roof.

Pandu Ranga Rao can be contacted on 9341856071 or e-mail: info@icantech.in.

Reposted from: APCD Empowerment Cafe

Toronto police have settled a human rights claim filed by a paraplegic man arrested during the G20 summit, but the terms will not be made public due to a confidentiality clause.

Gabriel Jacobs, a panhandler paralyzed from the waist down, filed a claim with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario last year, after he was arrested during the 2010 summit and later released without charge.

According to the claim, Jacobs was “dragged” from his motorized wheelchair, thrown into the back of a police cruiser and left on the floor of a temporary G20 detention centre where he defecated on himself because guards refused to help him.

Tess Sheldon, Jacobs’ lawyer, told the Star the claim was settled Friday, but said the terms “remain confidential.”

“The matter has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of all parties,” said Sheldon, who handled the case pro bono with ARCH Disability Law Centre.

Jacobs, 48, sought $100,000 in compensation for humiliation and loss of dignity in his claim, filed against the arresting officer, the Toronto Police Services Board and Police Chief Bill Blair.

The claim also asked for mandatory human rights training for police and an order for the police board to develop policies to better accommodate the disabled in jails and temporary holding centres.

Sheldon said she could not disclose the amount awarded to Jacobs. While she confirmed the police force is undergoing policy changes regarding the treatment of disabled people, she could not confirm if this was as a direct result of Jacobs’ claim.

“Given the upcoming policy changes, we are optimistic that Mr. Jacobs’ experience will not be repeated for others,” she said.

Mark Pugash, director of corporate communications for the Toronto police, said he could not comment on the settlement because of its confidential nature.

When asked if the settlement could be seen as an admission of guilt by the police, Pugash said “settlements, by definition, do not involve any admission of any kind.”

Reached at his subsidized apartment near Dundas St. E. and Sherbourne St. Tuesday night, Jacobs said he was “content and satisfied” with the outcome.

“I just did the best that I could to help other handicapped individuals,” he said.

But Doug Johnson Hatlem, a downtown Toronto street pastor and advocate for Jacobs, called the settlement “hush money.”

“(Jacobs) never found out the names of the officers who did this so you have a certain amount of money being paid to buy impunity for officers who treated one of our most vulnerable like a ragdoll.”

With files from David Rider

Republished from: TheStar.com

A new program designed to empower individuals teaches them how to overcome popular perceptions about vision loss and compete with able-bodied entrepreneurs.

Last fall, the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship launched an initiative aimed at providing entrepreneurship skills and training to individuals who are blind or visually impaired. With 200 students enrolled in the continuing education program at the Hadley School for the Blind in Winnetka, Ill., the initiative is one of the largest in the U.S. dedicated solely to encouraging the visually impaired to launch and expand small businesses, says Urban Miyares, president of the Disabled Businesspersons Association in San Diego.

Miyares, a blind and hearing-impaired Vietnam veteran who serves as a content adviser for the program, says that while it is difficult for the disabled to compete in the able-bodied business world, it’s not impossible. The blind even have a few tricks and techniques they can use to gain advantage. He spoke recently to me; edited excerpts of our conversation follow.

Along with basic business courses, how does the Forsythe Center curriculum specifically help blind entrepreneurs compete in the business world?

We teach that success starts with personality, communications, and making changes in ourselves, along with persistence and passion for what we do. One of the requirements is that we can’t be passive. Vision is presumed to be required for business, so if we have to compete on the same level as the sighted, able-bodied world, that means working more aggressively—and longer hours.

You’ve been an entrepreneur for four decades. What kind of hours do you put in?

My average work week is 80 to 90 hours. It takes me an hour to read a Facebook page with voice-output software. But the alternative is staying home waiting to die, which is what I was told to do when I lost my sight. So entrepreneurship is a good choice, particularly because there are so few employment options for the disabled.

The Internet has allowed so many people to become self-employed and work from home. Has it helped the blind and visually impaired?

Actually, the Internet has created more work obligations for us. It’s very time-consuming because you have to listen to the computer talking. I get 200 to 300 e-mails a day, but I get through them because I have a program that’s taught me to listen to over 400 words a minute.

But work is a way of contributing back to society, and many of us are givers, not takers. We’re trying to change that perspective society has of the disabled being takers. Quite a few blind people are excited about this opportunity.

Visually impaired individuals are typically eligible for government assistance. Are those benefits jeopardized by working or running a business?

Yes, you can lose benefits by the mere act of working and many people are frightened about losing their benefits, so that’s one of the things we talk about in the course. We also talk about how to get into business and how to get out of business.

There are also some benefits that quite a few disabled people are not even aware of. For instance, a World War I law says disabled veterans in vending, peddling, or hawking businesses do not have to pay licensing or permit fees. Those laws are in every business and professional code in every state, but they’re not widely known. One vendor I met in California 14 years ago had been paying $900 a year and he blew a fuse when I told him he didn’t have to pay that fee.

Are there specific business types that are best for blind entrepreneurs to pursue?

It really doesn’t matter what kind of business you get into. I’ve owned a steel-welding company, an electronics company, and a printer-board company. There are blind people who own trucking companies; obviously they don’t drive, but they hire others to do that.

One myth is that blind people have better hearing than sighted people. So there’s a blind piano tuners’ association and blind people get jobs in the recording industry. But the truth is, our hearing isn’t any better—we just concentrate and focus on listening more. For instance, I can detect a person who’s lying. I’ll be in meetings where somebody gives a presentation and afterward people say, “Isn’t that a great program?” And I’ll say: “The guy’s lying through his teeth” because I am attuned to detect lies by listening to someone’s voice.

Blind entrepreneurs don’t seem to have high profiles in the business community, even though they could serve as terrific role models. Why is that?

When you’re disabled and you run a company, you have to put yourself in the background until you reach a certain level of business success. Because once people find out we’re disabled, it often hurts us.

For instance, if you were approached by a blind CPA, you’d be hesitant to have that person do your taxes. All sorts of questions would come up that don’t arise with people who have sight. But there are people who are totally blind who do tax returns successfully. It’s all about image and perception and getting people to give us a chance.

How do disabled people get around those perceptions and prejudices?

Often we will design an environment that suits us because we have control over it, like in business meetings. Other times there’s a shock factor we can use to our advantage. In the 1980s, my company did printer circuit boards and I was trying to get a big contract. I asked if I could come over to a potential client’s office and see the president.

I went in with my cane and the receptionist was shocked that I was blind and had traveled a distance to be there. There were a whole bunch of people in the waiting room, but I got in shown in first. And instead of 10 minutes, I got a half hour with the head of the company, who happened to have a family member who was blind. We got the contract and it saved our business at that time.

Do you expect all the students in the Forsythe program to become entrepreneurs?

Certainly not—and we’ve marketed it as a great course in self-awareness, even for those who are not immediately interested in opening businesses. But many people in the future may decide the job they have is not fulfilling or challenging or they can’t find work. That’s when they may expand a hobby or a passion into a business.

So many people at maturity are starting businesses now, as they’re being diagnosed with vision problems or degenerative disease. They know they’ll need to work for themselves because nobody will hire them. And so many veterans are coming back from wars with vision loss. It’s No. 1 of the most common disabilities in today’s veterans, after hearing loss and traumatic brain injury.

Karen E. Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.

Republished from: Bloomberg Businessweek

He also works with National Association for the Blind (NAB), Goan, as a computer trainer.

“I am blind but that doesn’t stop me unless I stop myself,” he said.

The lanky Goan was in the capital Tuesday to attend TechShare 2012, a platform to showcase the latest advancements in technologies that could provide greater self-dependence to the disabled.

However, he agreed that most of the 70 million Indians who suffer from disabilities, don’t have such a positive outlook.

“Breaking the self created barriers is most important. I know a guy who is an MBA but despite all his qualifications, he is unemployed because he himself thinks that he is not fit to work, travel or lead a normal life,” he told IANS.

Talking about how people often lose hope when faced with disability, he said that indulging in self pity does no good.

“The society has to accept the disabled as equals, but the disabled themselves have to realise that disability doesn’t take away their right to a normal life,” he said.

Agreeing with Haaziq, Shilpi Kumar, managing director of BarrierBreak Technologies, and organiser of the annual event, said: “The society often pities the disabled and the disabled often believe that they are to be pitied.”

“Our motive behind TechShare is to create an ecosystem where the disabled can find their self dignity and realize that they too can live a normal, independent life,” she said.

The event also had an ‘Experience Zone’ where corporates, innovators and entrepreneurs provided live demo of products such as talking clocks for blind, Braille keyboards and assistance systems for the disabled that could help them interact, navigate and even drive a car.

Reproduced from: TwoCircles.net

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes — including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com.

Now, where was I?

Arch-exponents of the visual aid congregate on the web at SlideShare, an invaluable site where you can upload and share your latest ‘deck’ (of slides) with your peers. It’s a handy stop for anyone keen to get a quick briefing on the ubertrendy in marketing and technology, and you can learn a lot from seeing how other people prepare their slides (both good and bad!).

SlideShare has just issued its ‘Zeitgeist’ summary for 2011, picking out key developments in presentation culture across the globe. The first thing to note is that, with 80% of all material uploaded from USA and Europe, planet SlideShare is heavily Western. Asia is bubbling under at 19%, but Africa still only accounts for 1% of content.

Asia leads the world in presentation length, however, with an average of 29 slides from Japanese contributors, followed closely by China with 27. The good news for fidgety exporters is that Japanese presentations are shrinking — down from a yawntastic average 42 slides in 2010. Spain appears to be the tersest nation — with an average of 20 slides per deck.

Bells and whistles are on the increase everywhere if file size is anything to go by. The most popular presentations (those rated highest by peers) weigh in at a mailbox-busting 9.2mb average (from 7.9mb in 2010). As you might expect from a previous post on Marketing Talk, men use more slides than women — 26 vs 22 as a rule.

So, what are all these presentations actually about? To help you find what you are looking for, their creators use tags — labels which identify content. The most popular this year, as last, is ‘business’, with ‘marketing’ and ‘design’ occupying second and third slots. Last year it was ‘markets’ and ‘research’. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the fact that SlideShare is all about sharing stuff on the web, the most frequently-named companies are Twitter and Facebook (between them counting for about 70% of all references to business) with Google in third place at 20%. Apple only manages about 4% — a worrying trend perhaps?

To conclude, if you want to be a power in the land of powerpoint you might want to take note of the following:

Government focus on alleged fraud and over-claiming to justify cuts in benefits is fuelling abuse against disabled people, charities have warned.

Six groups told the Guardian that a narrative of “benefits scroungers or fakers” was making disabled people increasingly become the target of resentment, which some organisations fear could spill over into hate crimes.

The charities – Scope, Mencap, Leonard Cheshire Disability, the National Autistic Society, Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) and Disability Alliance – said inflammatory media played a part, but laid the blame largely with ministers and civil servants for repeatedly highlighting supposed mass abuse of the system, it was reported.

The Government has pledged to cut the bill for disability living allowance (DLA), which is to be replaced by the personal independence payment (PIP), by 20% by 2015/16.

Last month, minister for disabled people Maria Miller said: “In the past DLA has been poorly managed so we now have a situation where there are hundreds of millions of pounds of overpayments and the vast majority of people get the benefit for life without systematic checks to see if their condition has changed.”

Last April, employment minister Chris Grayling said the “vast majority” of new claimants for sickness benefits were in fact able to go back to work, after official figures showed three-quarters of applicants for employment and support allowance (ESA) failed to qualify for assistance.

Tom Madders, head of campaigns at the National Autistic Society, told the newspaper: “The Department for Work and Pensions is certainly guilty of helping to drive this media narrative around benefits, portraying those who received benefits as workshy scroungers or abusing a system that’s really easy to cheat.”

Some disabled people avoid going out because of the hostile climate, or avoid using facilities such as designated parking bays if they “don’t look disabled”, it was claimed. According to polling by Scope, in September two-thirds of people with disabilities said they had experienced recent hostility or taunts, up from 41% four months before.

The charities’ comments come after a warning that highly vulnerable households could be harmed by the Government’s planned

Keep these four tips in mind before setting up your press release.

1. Target Newspapers First

Radio stations and TV channels often dump hundreds of press releases every day without even giving them a second glance. They simply do not need the same steady flow of newsworthy stories that a newspaper would need. After all with the exception of paid advertisements and maybe a few pages of comics all the newspaper is – is news. So when you are ready to send out a press release, the newspaper is the place to start.

2. A Press Release is NOT an Ad

If you contact the newspaper or news organization just wanting them to promote your business, you are going to have a hard time. Media organizations have advertising departments that will gladly talk about your company for a fee; this is not the same thing as a press release. With a press release you are sending out notice of something newsworthy that is going on with your company or within your industry. You may have to get very creative in order to make what is going on at your small business newsworthy, but it is almost always possible to come up with some type of “news angle”. Once you come up with a legitimate news story that just happens to promote your business you will have a much easier time finding someone to pick it up.

3. Next Try Talk Radio

Getting your news covered on a standard music station can be rather difficult but getting some time on talk radio is much easier. When sending out your press release information contact local talk radio stations to see if any of them are interested in your services. You can usually find at least one station that could use you as a story. For this type of press release you will be talking about your business, what you do, or some topic related to your business. This can open the door for a lot of possibilities and inadvertently you are promoting your business to potential clients and customers via the radio.

4. Finally Getting on Television

There is always a possibility of getting your news out to the masses through the wonderful world of TV. This is probably one of the more difficult tasks but it can be accomplished by most small businesses with a little work a little experience and a whole lot of creativity. (And having the producer’s brother-in-law as your weekly golf partner doesn’t hurt either!)

One thing that you should realize is that you aren’t going to get your first press release on a major network, unless you are doing something truly amazing. Chances are you don’t have the desire to get on a major network anyway; you are a small business that is mostly interested in targeting local clientele or a limited target audience. In this case you should contact all local news stations to see if you can drum up any interest in your press release.

A good way to ensure that a station will pick up your news is by creating a gimmick or novelty to go with it. But remember, this isn’t the same thing as an ad, you still need something newsworthy. Television tends to go for the dramatic, the novel and silly.

Adding press releases to your small business marketing plan is a great way to garner some publicity for your business. The most important tip to keep in mind is to ensure that your news is actually newsworthy.

Reproduced from: Modern Image Marketing