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The mobile Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Training Centre will travel between special needs schools in disadvantaged areas. The centre will focus on the basics of using a computer, including Microsoft Office, and the web. The training is designed to help children with disability from underprivileged backgrounds escape poverty and gain employment later in life.

The project is in keeping with the South African Government’s plan to help people with disability integrate into mainstream society.

Executive Director of Vocal Eyes, Judy Dixey, explained in The Guardian that the celebrities were given assistance from audio description professionals, including research about the landmarks and writing the scripts.

It’s that time again for the people of the Northern Tablelands state election. Some people view it as a right, others say it is an obligation. Either way, the law requires we cast our ballots in a by-election.

Here in New South Wales, the NSW Electoral Commission has spent considerable time developing an online voting application for use in state elections and by-elections. It’s called iVote, and was first used at the last state election in 2011 to great success.

While Google has made significant steps to improve the accessibility of some of its applications, including Gmail and Chrome, Shandra says that the company fails to integrate the needs of disabled users into its product development.

Shandra identifies the social network Google+ as an example of a product which has been released to the public with inaccessible buttons and form fields.

What is the state of audio description in the world?

There are many countries that now have regulations in place for audio description, including Italy, Poland, Spain, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Canada, France, Ireland, Portugal and the USA. However, most of these are for public channels only and Portugal has not implemented its requirements. Only five of the countries listed have some audio description (AD) on commercial channels. Poland and Spain have a handful of programs, whereas the UK, Canada and USA have a form of across-the-board service.

Ofcom notes that the quality of pre-prepared captions (which are called ‘subtitles’ in the UK) is generally very good, and the majority of complaints it receives are related to live captioning. As caption quotas have risen, so have the number of programs being captioned live. Most of this captioning is now undertaken using speech recognition technology, but this is imperfect and errors are common. 

Following consultation with viewers and representative groups, Ofcom has concluded that the four key dimensions that affect the quality of live captions are:

In the presentation, Hollier and Wood discuss how the course, the only one of its kind, enables the Australian government to comply with international web accessibility guidelines.

Their paper highlights the challenges faced by the Australian Government as it progresses towards WCAG 2.0 conformance, and how the course equips government web professionals to meet them.

That compromise is one that allows exhibitors to screen captioned movies across a wide range of sessions where the captions are seemingly ‘open’ to those that are wearing filtering glasses, very similar to 3D glasses. The glasses do not carry projection equipment making them lightweight and less bulky than current captioned cinema eyewear such as Sony’s.

Along with funding for DisabilityCare and education reform, funding to the ABC was boosted by $109.4 million. This money is allocated to news and current affairs and digital delivery of programming. What is noticeably absent is funding for an audio description service. Audio description is essential for providing equal access to television for people who are blind and vision impaired.

Mika Pyyhkala and Lindsay Yazzolino claim they could not get past the H&R Block log-in page when they attempted to file their tax returns in 2012. The complaint alleges H&R Block's website excludes blind taxpayers from accessing the same online service available to other taxpayers.

Article 114 of the Massachusetts Constitution states: