The National Federation of the Blind 2012 Scholarship Program is underway. The NFB annually offers blind college students in the United States and Puerto Rico the opportunity to win one of thirty national scholarships worth from $3,000 to $12,000. All scholarship applications and documentsmust be received by the scholarship program no later than March 31, 2012.
For over sixty years, the National Federation of the Blind has been the leading source for helping blind and visually impaired people find the resources, support, and hope they need to lead productive and fulfilling lives. The NFB offers countless resources concerning vision loss, but also information that reflects high-expectations, promotes self-confidence, and provides inspiration for blind and visually impaired people and their loved ones.
Visually impaired and blind students show determination in their quest to achieving their college degree. One individual may use a cane or a seeing-eye dog, while another may need enlarged-print copies of course materials and have to sit at the front of the classroom in order to see the professor. Most blind and visually impaired students have their own strategies for learning; adaptive technology and for a more personal touch, assistants, better known as “readers”.
Adaptive Technology
They may make use of devices such as talking calculators, computer programs with speech-output such as JAWS or Kurzweil, and adapted electronic writing tablets with speech-output which make taking notes easier. JAWS is a very common software for blind students - it literally reads the content of the computer screen aloud by using optical character recognition (OCR) and synthesized speech output.
Readers
Some blind and visually impaired students will have another student assisting them with important tasks such as picking up books from the library, scanning course materials and editing written work for errors in punctuation and formatting. These assistants are called "readers" because before the advent of speech-output computer technology, the reader would actually be making recordings of themselves reading books aloud. Nowadays, most readers spend a lot of time organizing books and articles and scanning them into a computer equipped with speech-output software.
Scholarships offer means of achieving their higher education goals.
ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS for the 2012 Scholarship Program
All applicants for these scholarships:
- must be legally blind (PDF document) in both eyes, and
- must be residing in the United States, the District of Columbia, or Puerto Rico, and
- must be pursuing or planning to pursue a full-time, postsecondary course of study in a degree program at a United States institution in the 2012 scholastic year, except that one scholarship may be given to a person employed full-time while attending school part-time, and
- must participate in the entire NFB national convention and in all of its scheduled scholarship program activities.
Click here for additional application requirements and information.
In addition to a scholarship, each winner will receive assistance to attend the 2012 National Federation of the Blind Annual Convention in July, providing an excellent opportunity for high-level networking with active blind persons in many different professions and occupations.
For local information:
The Virginia Department for the Blind and Visually Impaired
397 Azalea Avenue
Richmond, Virginia 23227-3623
(804) 371-3140
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