NAD Opening Ceremony Highlights

Transcript/Summary:

Here’s a recap and highlights of the NAD Chicago Opening Ceremony with several images and video clips.

The FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel gave a keynote address and talked about the potential of AI to solve a lot of the needs of disabled people. She also announced that the FCC would meet in a few weeks on possibly adding a rule (policy) to provide direct video calling to federal agencies. This means deaf people could call an ASL representative from federal agencies.

The Chicago Mayor gave a warm welcome with a video message accompanied with an ASL interpreter. Also making an appearance is the Commissioner on the Mayor’s Office of People with Disabilities, who is a Deaf woman herself, Rachel Arfa. She gave several remarks.

The emcee was Tom Adamo, who is from Chicago. There was a clip shown of an old performance he did where he impersonated Elvis. There were also two assistant emcees. All three are from Chicago.

There was a touching moment when the NAD honored the late Dr. Jon Henner, who was a Deaf researcher, academic, writer, and someone who had strong opinions and shared it on Twitter. Many in the Deaf community treasured him and it was tragic when he passed away from cancer. His wife and family came onstage to accept the Distinguished Service Award posthumously.

There was also a special award given to the three people behind the D.C. Movie Theater Open Captioning Bill. (Brianne Burger, Reema Bogin, Erik Nordolf received the Knights of Flying Fingers Award).

The ceremony wrapped up. During the night, people outside flocked to the Navy Pier to see the fireworks. That’s all for tonight. I will cover more from the NAD Conference tomorrow.

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