Practical Web Accessibility news

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5 good news stories from CSUN 2012

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Dr Scott Hollier, Project Manager at Media Access Australia, has recently returned from the CSUN 27th Annual international Technology & Persons With Disabilities conference held in San Diego, California. Here are five things that Scott is excited about.

1. Change comes from letting people know about accessibility issues

A key theme running through talks on web accessibility, disability-related employment initiatives, education services and social media resources is that an organisation that has technology-related accessibility issues is likely to try and address them if enough people let them know there’s a problem. Many of the talks focused on providing information on how to raise accessibility issues with organisations, and in turn get accessibility issues addressed.


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First university backed web accessibility course for professionals launched

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We have today launched Australia’s first university-backed web accessibility course, offering industry professionals the practical skills needed to meet international accessibility standards, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.

A joint venture by Media Access Australia and the University of South Australia, the Professional Certificate in Web Accessibility aims to meet the need for technical and managerial staff with web accessibility expertise, as recently spurred on by the Australian Government’s commitment to making government websites accessible as part of the National Transition Strategy (NTS). 


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NT and NSW governments formally adopt WCAG 2.0

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The New South Wales and Northern Territory governments have joined other states and territories by publicly endorsing the latest international web accessibility standard. This commitment will help ensure that government websites are useable for everyone, regardless of disability. 

The WCAG 2.0, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, is a list of guidelines which indicate how websites can be made accessible to various degrees.


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Google: our video accessibility team has been hard at work

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Google has just announced a number of enhancements to closed captioning across its video service, YouTube. Given YouTube’s presence and influence across the web, these changes radically enhance the accessibility of online video for users who are Deaf or hearing impaired.

Since launching support for closed captions in 2006, YouTube has continued to expand and improve the service, and has recently introduced a number of new features which make finding or creating captioned videos easier than ever.

Writing in the YouTube blog, software engineer Ken Harenstien, a member of Google and YouTube’s video accessibility team, outlined the features added in the last few months:

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