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Apple announces launch of iPad 2 and iOS 4.3

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Apple today announced the launch of iPad 2 and an update to Apple’s operating system iOS to version 4.3, which will be released in America next week and in Australia on 25 March with minor accessibility improvements.

The iOS 4.3 update has seen some bug fixes to accessibility features. Apple has now fixed the issue preventing controls from being dismissed in some cases, and where the keyboard could not reappear when highlighting and browsing search results. Apple has also adjusted VoiceOver so that it reads entire charts in the ‘Stocks’ app when it is in landscape mode.

Features to the iPad 2 itself that may improve the accessibility for some users include:

Taxonomy: 
Captions
Sensory impairment
Audio description
Digital technology
News
Digital media and technology: 
iOS
iPad

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Government announces the Terms of Reference for the Convergence Review

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The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) today released the Terms of Reference for the Convergence Review. The Convergence Review will examine Australia’s regulatory approach to convergent media, with the Terms of Reference setting the scope of the review.

Convergence refers to the “development of digital broadcasting, data compression and internet-based technologies, coupled with improved infrastructure capability, [which] means that content and services that were previously constrained to one delivery channel can now be delivered over many different platforms”. Examples of convergent media include online TV catch-up services and smartphones, which have phone and Internet capabilities.

Taxonomy: 
Australian policy and legislation
News
Sensory impairment
DBCDE, Department of Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy
Research & policy
News

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Read Captions Across America Day

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Today is Read Captions Across America day, an annual campaign to promote the use of captions particularly for children, as video-based media can be a great instrument in nurturing reading skills when captions are turned on.

Hosted by the National Education Association (NEA) in partnership with the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP), the campaign aims to bring the use of captions to the forefront of the minds of teachers and parents around the country, encouraging them to turn captions on.

Taxonomy: 
General
Captions
Education
Deaf or hearing impaired
News
Parents
Teacher

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Free and low-cost screen reader use increases according to survey

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WebAIM has released the results from its third screen reader user survey conducted in December 2010.

The latest survey, with 1245 valid responses, was a follow-up to the original WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey of January 2009 and the follow-up survey from October 2009.

The survey showed that the usage of free and low-cost screen readers such as NVDA and VoiceOver has increased significantly since the last survey.

Taxonomy: 
News
Blind or vision impaired
Digital technology
News
Digital media and technology: 
NVDA
Mac OS X
Screen readers
VoiceOver

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