Passed in Parliament in November 2010, the iVote website has been designed to be accessible to people who are blind and vision impaired, allowing them to independently cast a secret vote. The accessibility features of the iVote website include ARIA landmarks, clearly labelled form elements, easy page navigation and meaningful links.
Voters are eligible to use iVote if:
Pulis is one of three non-profit staff in Australia who won the Connecting Up Australia scholarship for the conference, which will take place from 17 to 19 March. The event promotes international communication with other non-profit organisations from around the world, and interaction with the latest in technological developments.
The official NVDA blog of NVDA 2011.1 reports on the release and highlights some of the key new features which include but are not limited to:
The program, which can be viewed on ABC's iView service with captions, noted that many of the problems stem from an increased use of ‘voice captioning’ (where a captioner re-speaks dialogue as a program goes to air and speech recognition software converts it into captions). Previously, live programs and live segments of news bulletins could only be captioned by highly-paid, highly-trained stenocaptioners.
Reinstatement of the quotas for audio description (called ‘video description’ in the US) is a provision of the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, which was signed into law by President Obama in October.
The quotas were originally introduced by the FCC in 2000, but its authority to do this was successfully challenged in the United States Court of Appeal five months later.
According to the Closedcaptioning.net website, while captioning on the main US channels is at or close to 100%, the FCC’s caption regulations still include some types of programming which are exempt.
COAT is arguing that captioning has become easier and less expensive in recent years, and these exemptions should be eliminated. They include:
