iCanConnect — National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program (USA)

iCanConnect (the National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program, NDBEDP) is a US federal program mandated by the 2010 Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act and administered by the FCC. It serves low-income Americans who are deafblind or have significant combined vision and hearing loss, with delivery decentralised across 56 FCC-certified lead organisations covering every state, DC and five territories, including Perkins School for the Blind, which leads delivery in 14 states.

The program aims to give eligible individuals free specialised communications equipment plus free in-home assessment, installation and training so they can use telecommunications and the internet independently. Training explicitly excludes braille instruction, keyboard skills and general computer literacy, covering only the distributed equipment itself.

Equipment distributed includes smartphones, tablets, computers, braille displays, screen readers and magnification software. The program is capped at $10 million a year, drawn from the federal Interstate Telecommunications Relay Service Fund, and became a permanent FCC program on 1 July 2017 after a 2012–2017 pilot phase, with allocation announcements confirming continuous funding cycles through at least 2025–2026.

No independent evaluation of outcomes could be located, and no reliable current total of people served could be confirmed; an early 2013 snapshot cited roughly 600 people in the process of receiving assistance, which the source itself notes is not a meaningful current figure. Independent sources also give inconsistent estimates of the eligible population (40,000–70,000 in one 2014 estimate versus roughly 1 million in a 2013 estimate), and multiple program-facing sources note an awareness and outreach gap among eligible deafblind individuals.