The latest and final draft of a new European Standard for the accessibility of ICT products and services procured by the public sector – known as “Mandate 376” – is to be placed online next week, E-Access Bulletin has learned.
Users, developers, manufacturers, public bodies and procurers will have until October to offer feedback on the standard and associated documents before formal work begins on legislation this autumn.
A new series of apps has been developed to enhance accessibility features for Android-enabled smartphones for blind and visually impaired users.
The “Georgie” apps allow blind and visually impaired users to perform a number of functions additional to ‘standard’ phone features, including recording and broadcasting audio blogs; photographing text and having it read out to them, using an optical character recognition feature; and audio tagging images with sound clips. It will also read aloud screen text when users touch the screen, and voice recognition software enables users to speak the content for text messages into the phone.
A piece of software that can correct spelling as the user types into any programme – hugely valuable for people with dyslexia – has won the accessibility award at the second annual Technology4Good awards, presented in London this month.
“Global AutoCorrect” (
www.lexable.com/GlobalAutoCorrect )
is the brainchild of Neil Cottrell, a 24-year-old graduate who is himself severely dyslexic.
By Tristan Parker
For Channel 4, being the official broadcaster of the 2012 Paralympic Games comes with a lot of prestige, but there are also significant accessibility challenges. If the website and other digital services of this event were not accessible to disabled people, it would be absurd – not to mention catastrophic from a PR perspective.
However, rising to these challenges have helped improve the overall standard and awareness of digital accessibility within the channel, says Paul Edwards, Channel 4’s online programme manager for the Paralympics 2012.
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