Skip to Content Skip to Main Menu Skip to Submenu Skip to Search View Mobile site

You are here:

Latest News

December 2012
Date Published	News headline and description
10 December 2012	Top 12 of 12 #6 – changes to the Broadcasting Services Act An issue close to home for many of our readers is the quality and availability of captions on free-to-air and subscription TV. Good news arrived in June when the captioning provisions of the Broadcasting Services Act were amended for the first time in a decade.
07 December 2012	Top 12 of 2012 #5 - teachers championing captions for all students Our annual cap that! campaign asking teachers nationwide to turn on captions for literacy and inclusion for all students this year recruited almost 400 teachers committed to using captions in their schools.
07 December 2012	Media Access Australia contributes to the NDIS Media Access Australia will be creating a Providers Accessibility Guide as part of a suite of projects announced by the Australian Government this week which fall under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
06 December 2012	Partnership to provide training for deafblind Telstra and non-profit organisation Able Australia have joined together in a program to help increase access to technology for Australians who are deafblind.
06 December 2012	Top 12 of 2012 #4 – captions come to SBS online In July, SBS became the second Australian television network to offer captions on its catch-up service.
05 December 2012	ACMA releases draft television captioning standard The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has released a draft of the new standard covering caption quality on free-to-air and subscription television.
05 December 2012	Top 12 of 2012 #3 – the National Transition Strategy The Australian Government should have made significant progress towards making each of its websites accessible in 2012 as a result of the Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy.
04 December 2012	Top 12 of 2012 #2 – access to social media As social media continues to dominate what people do online, a new digital divide is opening up between those who use social media and those excluded from them by their inaccessibility. To help remedy this, we published sociABILITY: Social media for people with a disability in March.
03 December 2012	Sydney Opera House introduces captioned online videos As part of the 3 December celebration of International Day of People with Disabilities, Sydney Opera House has published the first four of 31 closed captioned videos from its 2012 Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI).
03 December 2012	Top 12 of 2012 #1 – the audio description trial As 2012 winds to a close, we take a look at the twelve biggest events impacting on access to media for people with a disability. Possibly the biggest of all was the first broadcast of audio description (AD) on Australian TV as the ABC performed its 13-week trial.
03 December 2012	Access achievements honoured at National Disability Awards Individuals and organisations committed to improving access to media foe people with disability were honoured at the National Disability Awards, which were held at the National Gallery of Australia on Wednesday night.

November 2012
Date Published	News headline and description
30 November 2012	App increases mobility for blind in Dublin A navigation app for Apple iOS devices called Walk Dublin will help to increase the mobility of blind and vision impaired users by providing walking directions to cultural landmarks in the Republic of Ireland Capital. Launched this week by the Dublin City Council, the app was developed in consultation with the National Council for the Blind.
30 November 2012	European languages added to YouTube’s auto-captioning YouTube has this week announced automatic captions will now be available in another six languages across the video sharing network. YouTube has added its auto-captioning tool for videos in German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch. The feature is already available in English, Japanese, Spanish and Korean.
30 November 2012	Accessibility review: Microsoft Surface tablet Microsoft's Surface tablet has promised to deliver the best of both worlds: an easy-to-use tablet for games and entertainment but also a serious productivity device that has a detachable keyboard, trackpad and Office software. Our interest though lies in its accessibility – is it a worthy purchase for people with disabilities? Dr Scott Hollier road tested the Surface tablet to find out how it fares for accessibility.
30 November 2012	sociABILITY translated into Hungarian Our sociABILITY: Social media for people with a disability resource has been made available to people in Hungary through the Australian Embassy’s Public Diplomacy Program. To celebrate International Day of Persons with Disability, the Australian Ambassador to Hungary will give a translated version of the resource to the President of the Hungarian Association for the Blind and Vision Impaired in Budapest on Monday.
28 November 2012	Accessible DVD releases for November 2012 There have been 21 movies released on DVD in the last two months with closed captions and audio description. Of the 69 titles we researched, 53 were captioned (or 77 per cent) and 21 described (or 30 per cent).
27 November 2012	Highlights of the Languages and the Media conference The Languages and the Media conference was held in Berlin last week. This is the premier access conference in the world and Media Access Australia’s CEO, Alex Varley, provides his personal top 5 trends and highlights set to make a difference to the world of access.
26 November 2012	The Media Access News podcast Our weekly Vision Australia Radio segment is now available as a podcast which can be downloaded and subscribed to through iTunes.
22 November 2012	Presentation: Does measuring caption quality really make any difference? Our CEO, Alex Varley, is presenting at the Languages and the Media Conference in Berlin this week. Below are the slides and summary of his presentation questioning whether measuring caption quality leads to a better television experience for viewers.
22 November 2012	Greens Senators support audio description Senator Scott Ludlam, Greens spokesperson for communications, and Senator Rachel Siewert, Greens spokesperson for disability, have urged the Government to follow through on its commitment to working towards a permanent audio description service on Australian television.