E-Access Bulletin Live

The future of Braille is being threatened by the rise of digital audio technologies, but it continues to hold valuable potential to enhance the lives of blind people, according to an article in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica translated exclusively for this month’s E-Access Bulletin by Margherita Giordano.

Braille could become a “dead language” as new technologies such as telephone services with synthetic voices to read newspapers; talking computers and audio-books mean the tactile alphabet is being used less and less, the article says. 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.
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A government scheme to ensure all school pupils in England have access to computers and the internet at home could have a huge impact on the assistive technology sector.

Earlier this month, the government announced the launch of its ‘Home Access’ scheme to improve technology access for school pupils from lower-income families. Backed by some £300 million, the scheme is expected to provide computers and internet access for home use to around 270,000 families by March 2011.
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The online retailer Amazon.com is to incorporate extra accessibility features into its Kindle DX electronic book reader or ‘e-reader’, after several American universities rejected the device as a potential teaching-aid, citing inaccessibility to blind students (see E-Access Bulletin, issue 119: www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=357 ).

Audible menus and an extra-large font size will be added to the new version of the Kindle DX on its release this summer. The menu feature addresses claims by Syracuse and Wisconsin-Madison universities that although the Kindle features a text-to-speech function valuable for blind users, inaccessible menus meant that such users would not be able to activate the function.
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An international treaty allowing people to share accessible versions of copyright works across national borders moved a step closer last month, with an agreement by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to consult on the issue.

The 19th session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), held in Geneva in December ( bit.ly/cHnS2R ), agreed to host a series of consultation meetings aimed at producing an international consensus.
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School pupils with serious disabilities are facing an indefinite delay, likely to last six months or more, to receive the assistive technology they need to benefit from the government’s new ‘Home Access’ computer scheme, E-Access Bulletin has learned.

The £300 million scheme ( www.homeaccess.org.uk ), managed by education ICT agency Becta ( www.becta.org.uk ), is providing computers to children aged 7-14 from low-income families. Launched this month, it aims to help around 270,000 families by March 2011.
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By Cynthia Waddell

The UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities addresses the rights of 650 million persons with disabilities and impacts two billion persons worldwide, including family members of persons with disabilities.

Six years in the making, the treaty opened for signatures in March 2007, receiving the highest number of signatories for any UN treaty on its opening day; and entered into legal force in May 2008.
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Google, the owner of video exchange website YouTube, has started providing automatic captions for some English language videos on the website, increasing accessibility for deaf users.

The ‘auto-caps’ system is made possible by Google’s own automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, working alongside the current YouTube captioning system.
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The UK’s first online library of educational textbooks in a range of digital formats accessible to visually impaired students has been launched.

‘Books for All’ is a joint project between The Seeing Ear ( www.seeingear.org ), a website which provides electronic books for visually disabled people, and the University of Edinburgh. It allows authorised and registered teachers and students with visual impairments to access an online catalogue of alternative format educational books for free.
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Disability rights groups, organisations working with people with disabilities and all other interested parties must carefully monitor their home nations’ compliance with the UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities to ensure moves towards more accessible information and communications technologies (ICT) do not fall by the wayside, one of the world’s leading accessibility analysts writes in this month’s E-Access Bulletin.

Cynthia Waddell, Executive Director of The International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI – www.icdri.org ), says the Convention entered into legal force in May 2008 and starting next year, 2010, all states that have ratified it will be required to report to the UN Committee on Rights of Persons with Disabilities on measures taken to meet its accessible ICT obligations.
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By Kel Smith

Many of us use and enjoy virtual worlds such as Second Life for work and play, and there is a vital demographic of virtual world participants with a wide range of disabilities: visual impairments, motor skill disorders, degenerative illness, limited mobility, and cognitive difficulties.

Many of these people use virtual technology to great social and therapeutic benefit. For these users, avatar-driven 3D environments serve as more than a game. Virtual worlds operate as a form of augmented reality, one where it’s possible to transcend a user’s physiological or cognitive challenges into something extraordinary.
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