General Colorado Center Information

MAKING CONNECTIONS THAT WORK FOR YOU Career and College Seminar

Friday, March 10, 2017
9:00 am to 3:00 pm

At the Colorado Center for the Blind
2233 West Shepperd Avenue
Littleton, Colorado 80120

Lunch will be provided. To reserve your lunch, please RSVP no later than March 6th to Monique Melton at mmelton@cocenter.org or 303-778-1130 extension 221.

Don’t miss the keynote address:
“Trends in Employment – The Future Has Arrived” presented by Alexandra Hall.

The pond at nearby Sterne Park usually has a fair share of Canada Geese and Mallards, and today was no exception as the group walked the path this morning.

Birding by Ear started up again today with a visit from Ali Mayes of the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies. Though it was warm, not a great variety of birds are around in February.

We were pleased to have three professionals from Blind Low Vision Services, part of Colorado’s Dept. of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) at the Center for training this week. We spent four days together exploring every topic we could think of, including cane travel and cooking under sleepshades. We’ll let them introduce themselves and the meal they cooked on Tuesday for themselves and our staff involved with the training. For the record, it was top shelf, and so are they!

The day didn’t go uncelebrated. The Seniors had a Valentine’s party (there are rumors of romance there). Even ITP got into the act with Valentine’s cookies to mark “National Singles Day”?

We were pleased to host usability testing of Dominion’s electronic voting system on February 13 and 14. Students, staff, seniors and alums took the system for a spin and provided feedback to Dominion’s engineers. We’re especially excited to partner on this project because Dominion will provide electronic voting systems to every county in Colorado for the next 7 or so years. What we share with them will be reflected in our nonvisual accessible voting for a good long while, and we applaud their effort to get our feedback!

Yes, we’re pleased and excite to be the host site for the Braille Challenge for 2017! Fifteen Metro-area students ages 6 to 17 are here to demostrate their skils in reading, writing and more using Braille. It’s our third year to host the Metro Challenge, which is sponsored by the Braille Institute of America and coordinated in Colorado by the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind. Last week, students in Colorado Springs met the Braille Challenge as well.

This afternoon the State Rehabilitation Council met at the Center. The SRC is required of each state’s Vocational Rehabilitation program, and includes members from across the state representing many disabilities.

Where were all our students, you may well ask. They were displaced today, working in all their classes from our McGeorge Mountain Terrace Apartments.

The first-ever meeting of a new Tactile Art Club will meet at CCB from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, January 17. It will be held monthly on the third Tuesday of each month.

Our long-time collaborator and art instructor, Ann Cunningham, CCB alum Jenny Callahan and CCB Tech Instructor Yolanda Thompson hatched the idea, inspired in part by the first-ever NFB Tactile Art and Tactile Graphics Symposium held at the National Center for the Blind in Baltimore last December.

“The idea is to grow a community around the idea of access to tactile art and tactile graphics,” Says Ann.

In 2016 31 CCB students received their Freedom Bell – the symbol that they completed all the requirements to graduate from the Center. As we start classes again on Tuesday, January 3, let’s wish our students of 2017 the same success and the confidence to take charge with self-reliance so that they can live the lives they want to live!

What could be more fitting on the shortest day of the year than a video about making fudge? Here’s Maureen with another Breaking Blind video with a holiday theme!

Here’s the first of a couple of holiday videos from our own Maureen’s Breaking Blind channel. Because … well, there might still be a few people who haven’t run across it yet!