Significant developments include progress on Recommendation 8, which called for the Australian Communications and Media Authority to develop caption quality guidelines under consultation. These guidelines are almost finalised and will be presented to the ACMA Board shortly.
The guide is a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the June 29, 2010, Dear Colleague Letter that was sent to college and university presidents expressing concern that these institutions were using electronic book readers that were inaccessible to people who were blind or vision impaired.
The FAQs, released on 26 May 2011, reinforce that the same considerations apply to:
The EFHOH, which has been campaigning for increased levels of captioning for the last ten years, notes that some countries have made great progress in that time. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France now have 100% captioning on their main television channels, but other countries are lagging behind.
The EFHOH notes that there are 50 million Deaf and hearing impaired people in Europe, and believes that 100% of programs on all public TV channels should be captioned by 2020.
AGIMO, which is part of the Department of Finance and Deregulation, is tasked with delivering the Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy – a strategy that requires government websites to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.
The strategy requires all Federal, State, and Territory government websites to conform to the Single A level of the WCAG 2.0 by the end of 2012. All Commonwealth Government websites must conform to the Double A level of WCAG 2.0 by the end of 2014.
