Americans Living with Disability and Their Technology Profile

Pew Internet (Jan. 21, 2011) According to a national survey conducted in September 2010, 27% of American adults live with a disability that interferes with activities of daily living, including:

* 15% of American adults who say they have serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs.
* 11% of American adults who say that, because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, they have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions.
* 9% of American adults who say they have serious difficulty hearing.
* 8% of American adults who say that, because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, they have difficulty doing errands alone such as visiting a doctor’s office or shopping.
* 7% of American adults who say they are blind or have serious difficulty seeing, even when wearing glasses.
* 3% of American adults who say they have trouble dressing or bathing.

Americans living with disability are more likely than other adults to live in lower-income households: 46% of adults with a disability live in households with $30,000 or less in annual income, compared with 26% of adults who report no disabilities and live in households with that level of income.

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People Blind from Birth Use Visual Brain Area to Improve Other Senses: Can Hear and Feel With Greater Acuity

ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2010) — People who have been blind from birth make use of the visual parts of their brain to refine their sensation of sound and touch, according to an international team of researchers led by neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC).

Published in the journal Neuron, the scientists say this finding helps explain why the blind have such advanced perception of these senses -- abilities that far exceed people who can see, they say.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found that the blind use specialized "modules" in the visual cortex that process the spatial location of an object when a person localizes it in space. More generally, they believe that the different functional attributes that make up vision, such as analysis of space, patterns, and motion, still exist in the visual cortex of blind individuals. But instead of using those areas to understand what the eyes see, the blind use them to process what they hear and touch because the same components are necessary to process information from those senses.

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