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Australian university adopts Google Apps for Education with known accessibility issues

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Australia’s RMIT University may be excluding students with disabilities after all of its 74,000 student email accounts were moved to Google Apps for Education.

Google Apps for Education is a suite of hosted email and collaboration applications, such as Google Mail (Gmail), Google Documents and Google Calendar, that are available to schools and universities free of charge.

Brian Clark, Executive Director of Information Technology Services at RMIT, is also expecting students to use the collaborative applications in the suite.

“There’s a range of collaborative features built into Google Apps’ technology that will allow students to collaborate on assignments,” said Clark.

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Student team wins Microsoft Imagine Cup for new and innovative assistive technology

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A team of students in the US has won second place in the Microsoft Imagine Cup for Note-Taker, an assistive technology that helps people who are blind or vision impaired take notes in the classroom as quickly and easily as their sighted peers.

Note-Taker uses a portable camera connected to a touch-screen tablet PC to take live video that can be enlarged to suit the needs of the student. At the same time, students can take typed or hand-written notes on a split-screen interface.

ACM Professional Member John Black, a member of the ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing, mentored the winning team from Arizona State University.

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YouTube expands automatic captioning to other languages

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YouTube, which introduced automatic captions for English language videos in 2009, has now expanded the service to Japanese videos.

The captions are created using Google’s speech recognition technology, and while the quality is variable, video owners can download the caption files and edit them. Caption files can also be also be translated into 50 other languages.

In March this year, YouTube began rolling out automatic captioning to all the English language videos it hosts. Video owners can speed up the process by clicking on a ‘request processing’ button.

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Nominations for the Captioning Awards close soon

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Nominations for the Deafness Forum’s Captioning Awards close on 29 July. The awards present an opportunity to celebrate the steps media and others have taken towards access over the year. This includes work in advertising, TV, DVD and events. The awards also recognise achievement in the promotion of captioning for social inclusion. 

“The world of captioning can often be a minefield of negotiating, quality control, technological glitches and sometimes unhappy customers for media producers,” said Allayne Woodford, Project Manager at Media Access Australia.

“The Captioning Awards is one night of the year when parties from behind and in front of the screen can come together and celebrate their successes and can encourage producers to continue bringing their work to millions of viewers.”

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