Deaf or hearing impaired

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Promoting captions at a young age benefits Deaf and hearing impaired students

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Introducing captions at an early age has benefits beyond the individual child, as it impacts on changing attitudes and practice for all concerned. Melissa Griswold’s article in The Hearing Journal, ’Introducing captioned media early’, outlines these psychological benefits. “Waiting until a child’s teen years to initiate discussion and practice – a time when students are more likely to reject anything that makes them feel different – can be risky.”

The article looks at how using captions in a family setting from a young age promotes positive attitudes towards captions. Ensuring that all content viewed in the family home and at school is captioned helps normalise a child’s experience. Griswold also encourages the hearing impaired child to take ownership and become the ‘technology expert’ for switching captions on.

Taxonomy: 
Education

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Oracle layoffs raise concerns over Sun's access initiatives

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Since Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems, a number of Linux accessibility specialists have been removed from the company, moving the focus of Linux access back towards the open-source community.

The former team leader for GNOME accessibility development, Willie Walker, has raised concerns about the decision by Oracle, indicating that Sun was now understaffed in this area and would not be able to continue to the same degree that it had previously.

Taxonomy: 
Digital technology

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UK study pushes for mandatory real-time captioning for all students

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A UK study from researchers at the University of Southampton offers a model solution for the adoption of real-time captioning technology in university lecture halls. The 2009 study by Mark Wald & John Mark-Bell, entitled ‘Benefiting disabled students by developing an application that uses captioning of multimedia to benefit all students’, examined both the accessibility needs of students who are Deaf or hearing impaired whilst also exploring the myriad of benefits of real-time captioning for lecturers and students alike.

Real-time captioning refers to the automatic generation of captions produced by speech recognition technology such as Dragon and Via Voice. This offers a readily available and more cost-effective solution when a stenographer is not available.

Taxonomy: 
Education

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Media Access Australia's response to the Media Access Review

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Submissions have now closed for the Federal Government’s Media Access Review.  It is expected that the full range of submissions will be posted on the Department of Communications website in the next few weeks.  Media Access Australia will provide some summaries and comments on the main issues raised then. 

In the meantime, MAA provided a full submission to the review.

Read Media Access Australia's full response to the review.

 

Taxonomy: 
Research & policy

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