The 2025 Audio Description People’s Choice Award finalist voting round is being held July 6-20. The winners will be revealed during the 2025 ACB Audio Description Awards Gala, which will take place virtually on November 13 at 7:30 PM ET.

On July 1, the Senate passed its version of the reconciliation package. After a long-night of debate, the bill passed with the narrowest of margins; a tie was broken by Vice President Vance. The bill will now return to the House of Representatives.

The Senate bill includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts. Like the original House version, it includes work requirements for Medicaid recipients and will subsequently cut significant funding to Medicaid services. Advocates should reach out to their House offices when requesting edits to the bill.

The Senate recently reintroduced the Older Americans Reauthorization Act. The reauthorization was slotted to go through in the last Congressional session, but never made it all the way through. Now, in the 119^th Congress, we need to urge Congress to pass the bill. The Older Americans Act, which has been around since 1965, provides various services to people over the age of 60 to ensure they receive needed services.

On Wednesday, June 18, the Senate reintroduced the Older Americans Reauthorization Act. The OAA was last reauthorized in 2020. Congress had worked to reauthorize it in the last Congressional session, but was unsuccessful. ACB follows the bill closely because of the large number of aging Americans who are likely to lose vision. ACB has and continues to advocate for more provisions of the bill to include vision services for the aging community. ACB thanks our affiliate, AAVL, for there strong advocacy on this issue.

As many know, Congress is in the process of passing a reconciliation bill that includes potential cuts to Medicaid services. ACB previously reported that the House had finished its version and passed it onto the Senate to discuss. This week, a draft of the Senate’s version of the bill was released. ACB is now reading through the text to better understand what the potential implications of the Senate version will be. Please stay tuned as we learn more about the new version of the bill.

On Thursday, June 12, 2025, the Supreme Court put out a unanimous opinion on an education-related case that the disability rights community is now excited about.

The case was brought by a teenage girl with epilepsy and her family from the state of Minnesota. She was fighting to receive as much instruction as her non-disabled peers. The legal question that was brought before the Supreme Court asked what standard of proof was necessary to demonstrate that the student was facing discrimination by the public school in education-related disability lawsuits.

ACB is excited to share our inaugural action alert through our new subscription to Speak4. Through this new program, we are making it easy for you all to reach out to Congress to advocate for important legislation and needs of the blind and low vision community. Please follow the link below to reach out to Congress concerning the reconciliation bill that may impact Medicaid services for persons with disabilities.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:

Scott Thornhill

Executive Director

202-467-5081

sthornhill@acb.org

The American Council of the Blind Announces 2025 Scholarship Recipients

The Department of Energy has put out what is called a Direct Final Rule through the federal register. The rule will go into effect on July 15. However, we do have the opportunity to offer our thoughts and opinions. The process explains that if enough discourse is brought about the new rule, the agency will have to postpone the rule.