Sensory impairment

Study of Canadian TV access levels released

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Media Access Canada has just released a study of captions and audio description on Canadian television which found that broadcasters are fulfilling their captioning obligations but falling behind on audio description.

The study found that all ten broadcasters were meeting or exceeding the caption quotas set by the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, although the quality of captions was variable. However, seven broadcasters were not meeting the requirement to provide 4 hours of audio described programs per week.

The study, which was carried out by Analysis and Research in Communications Inc., is the first to measure accessibility in Canadian Broadcasting since 1992.

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Auditing website accessibility: the role of EARL and evaluation tools

One of the most common questions that I am asked is “What’s the best way to check the accessibility of my organisation’s website?” It’s a question that all of us at Media Access Australia welcome as verifying if a website is accessible is a great starting point for developers to make online information available to people with disabilities.

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Sensory impairment

Web

Practical web accessibility

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BBC trials MyDisplay web customisation tool

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The BBC is currently trialling web customisation tool MyDisplay, designed to improve the accessibility of the BBC website for people with a disability.

A cloud-based tool, MyDisplay allows visitors to the BBC website to set up a theme tailored to their particular access needs, which is then applied across any of the three million BBC web pages the user visits.

The theme can include modifications to the text size, font style, colours and page structure. If users do not wish to customise their own theme, pre-defined themes are also offered in the categories of Limited vision, Asperger’s, ADHD, Dyslexia, Easier to read or BBC original. Once a theme has been created or selected it can be saved using a BBC account.

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Media Access Review progress page launched

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Today Media Access Australia launched a new webpage in our Research and Policy section detailing the progress which has so far been made on the Media Access Review recommendations.

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.

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Australian policy and legislation