E-Access Bulletin Live

A guide to the accessibility benefits and obstacles of major electronic book formats, including technical formats, e-book readers and reader software, has been published by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB).

E-book readers covered by the document (
www.rnib.org.uk/livingwithsightloss/readingwriting/ebooks ) include dedicated e-book readers; e-book reading software; and e-book readers for mobile phones.
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The Obama administration is undertaking two major exercises to help people with disabilities apply for government jobs, delegates heard at last month’s California State University Northridge (CSUN) Technologies and Persons with Disabilities Conference.

Employment was the central topic at CSUN, the largest assistive technology event in the world, this year celebrating its 25th anniversary. Less than a third of blind people of working age in the US have a job, delegates heard.
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A campaigning peer has ensured that the new Equality Act, an update of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), includes a commitment to online accessibility, by successfully moving an amendment as the law passed through the House of Lords.

Lord Low of Dalston, vice president and former chairman of the Royal National Institute of Blind People and himself blind, moved a change of wording to the Act to state that when providing information, organisations’ processes should “include steps for ensuring that… the information is provided in an accessible format.”
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The European Union looks set to backtrack on proposed legislation that would have required accessibility to disabled people of all manufactured consumer goods, from digital televisions to washing machines, E-Access Bulletin has learned.

A Brussels meeting this week is expected to confirm changes to the draft Equal Treatment Directive (ETD), first proposed by the European Commission in 2008 to ban discrimination in access to goods and services, as set out in its full title: Proposal for a Council Directive on implementing the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation
( bit.ly/9IFqXc ).
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By Tristan Parker.

At first glance, the accessibility results of this year’s Society of IT Management (Socitm) ‘Better Connected’ review of all UK council websites ( bit.ly/dltkU5 ) would suggest that online access to local government for disabled computer users and others using assistive technology is still not a priority.

This year, for example, fewer local authorities achieved level ‘A’ of the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version one (WCAG 1.0 bit.ly/cmbc4g ) than last year – 32 compared with 36 – and for the second year running, no council achieved the more stringent level ‘AA’.
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A new online knowledge centre for organisations working in the field of technology and social good is to be launched in June by the charity Nominet Trust, E-Access Bulletin has learned.

The trust (
bit.ly/aXFbxD ),
the UK’s largest charitable fund for social IT projects, was set up with £8 million from the UK’s internet domain name registry Nominet to fund UK-based and international internet-related initiatives in the sectors of education, research and development, safety and inclusion meeting the needs of the young, the elderly, the disabled and sick, the disadvantaged, and other vulnerable groups.
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UK local authority websites are “much more accessible now than they’ve ever been”, according to one specialist who worked on the recent ‘Better Connected 2010’ review of every local authority website in the UK conducted by the Society of IT Management (Socitm) (
bit.ly/dltkU5 ).

Bim Egan, senior web access consultant at the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), told E-Access Bulletin the difference between council websites’ accessibility this year compared with 2009 is “astonishing”. “A much bigger proportion of [councils] are getting the message and are putting processes in place to make their websites a lot more accessible”, she said.
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By Alessandra Retico

They are letters you can touch: six little dots you brush with your fingers, 64 combinations to encode the world. But now Braille, the blind person’s Esperanto, is set to become a dead language.

New technologies mean the tactile alphabet is being used less and less, as sound takes its place: technologies such as telephone services with synthetic voices to read newspapers; talking computers and audio-books. Many young blind people no longer learn the physical grammar that would allow them to communicate with any other user in any language, preferring to put on their headphones. These days, only 25% of Italian people who are blind (362,000) and 10% of blind Americans (1,300,000) know Braille (compared with a figure in the US of more than half of all blind children in the 1950s, according to a recent issue of the New York Times). Invented in 1829 by Louis Braille, who became blind at the age of six and inspired by a military code for the transmission of messages at night, the system still survives, but faces strong competition from information technology.
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Groundbreaking work to try to enable computers to describe visual content on web pages begun this month with the formation of a new UK academic research network.

The network is aiming to develop a web browser plug-in which would be able to analyse an image and describe it to a visually impaired user. It is one of a number of projects exploring computer vision and computer language programming to be undertaken by the new V&L Net ( www.vlnet.org.uk ) – the Vision and Language Network of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
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Manufacturers and suppliers of consumer technology devices in the US could be forced to make all their products accessible to blind consumers, if proposed legislation is passed by Congress.

Introduced by Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic House of Representatives member from Illinois, the Technology Bill of Rights for the Blind Act 2010 ( www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h4533/text ) is based around creating accessible alternatives to what it calls “increasingly complex user interfaces” found in consumer electronics.
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