The MDisability Provider Webinar series is hosted by and for primary care medical professionals who seek information on how to care for patients with disabilities. These webinars provide educational and clinical care insight, tools, and resources, and cover diverse topics about caring for people with physical, sensory, intellectual, and developmental disabilities. They are delivered by experienced primary care providers who care for people with disabilities. Some of these providers are also caregivers for a person with a disability or who may have a disability themselves. We are grateful to the Robert J. Fisher, M.D. Family Medicine Fund and to our partner Michigan Medicine's Center for Disability Health and Wellness (CDHW) (link is external) for the generous support of the MDisability provider webinar series through CDHW's collaboration with AHEAD-DC RRTC (link is external) and a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR #90RTHF0005). With their contributions, the webinars are held quarterly, include live captioning, and are free of charge.
June 2024 - Medical Education Accessibility Overview for Students and Trainees with a Disability
Presented by Christian Vogler, Ph.D. and Michael McKee, M.D., M.P.H.
The second webinar in our 2024 series held on June 13 was, “Medical Education Accessibility Overview for Students and Trainees with a Disability,” with Christian Vogler, Ph.D., director of the Technology Access Program at Gallaudet University. Dr. Vogler will provide an overview of meeting/webinar accessibility for Deaf and Hard of Hearing and low-vision individuals. MDisabiilty Director Michael M. McKee, MD, MPH, will co-present and discuss health information accessibility for Deaf, Hard of Hearing and Deaf Blind individuals
In addition to his role as director of the Technology Access Program, Dr. Vogler is a principal investigator within the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Telecommunications Access, with a particular focus on the accessibility of web conferencing and telecollaboration systems. In his role at the RERC, he is involved in bringing consumers and industry together on accessibility issues, as well as developing prototype technologies for improving the accessibility of such systems.
Prior to joining the Technology Access Program in 2011, Dr. Vogler worked on various research projects related to sign language recognition and facial expression recognition from video at the University of Pennsylvania; the Gallaudet Research Institute; UNICAMP in Campinas, Brazil; and the Institute for Language and Speech Processing in Athens, Greece. He also runs the DeafAcademics mailing list, a global network of deaf and hard of hearing researchers all over the world.
Dr. Vogler is passionate in his belief that deaf and hard of hearing people have only scratched the surface of what is possible with Internet and mobile communication technologies use, and that the most exciting technological developments are still to come. He is always on the lookout for students interested in communication technologies and who want to make a difference in how we use them.
About Dr. Michael M. McKee
Along with serving as MDisability director, Dr. McKee is an associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan. He also serves as the co-director of the Center for Disability Health & Wellness at U-M.
As a physician with hearing loss, Dr. McKee is especially interested in advocating for the rights of Deaf and hard of hearing patients to obtain equitable health care, including accessible communication. His research focus includes health disparities for individuals with various disabilities, health information accessibility, health literacy, and telemedicine applications.
