The Terms of Reference to the ‘Review of access to telecommunications by people with disability, older Australians and people experiencing illness’ is now open for comment from individuals, consumers, and representatives until 19th August 2011.
The review aims to explore, in relation to people needing assistance to access telecommunication services:
The DOJ has advised that it will not publish a ‘Notice of Proposed Rule Making’ (NPRM) relating to web access obligations until December 2012. An NPRM is the final step in the process of regulation formulation before a rule is actually created, meaning that formal regulations are unlikely until the following year at least.
The committee’s report was one of the requirements of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which was signed into law by President Obama last October. Now that the FCC has the report, it has six months to set new closed captioning rules.
“WA has seen some huge leaps in technology and policy in the past twelve months,” said Dr Scott Hollier from the WA office. “But we’ve also seen the accessible web community begin to thrive.”
One of the biggest WA news stories in accessibility has been the state government’s commitment to implement the W3C Web Contents Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 to either an ‘A’ or ‘AA’ level by the end of 2013.
‘Communicating data with Colour’ is an aid for graphic designers, cartographers and others who are required to use colour to convey visual information in an accessible way.
Colour blindness affects 8% of men (1 in 12) and up to 1% of women. Colour accessibility ensures that visual information is legible for people with colour blindness.
