E-Access Bulletin Live

Public sector procurement should be used to improve equality for people with disabilities, including the development of more accessible IT systems, according to a government bill passing through Parliament.

The Equality Bill
( services.parliament.uk/bills/2008-09/equality.html
), introduced to the Commons on 24 April and currently undergoing its committee stages, aims to reform and harmonise equality law. Notes accompanying the bill say: “With an annual expenditure of around £175 billion every year on goods and services, the public sector has an important opportunity to use its purchasing power to promote equality where possible.”
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Accessibility is to become a key priority for the British Interactive Media Association (BIMA –
www.bima.co.uk),
the body representing the interactive and digital content sector, incoming chair Justin Cooke has told E-Access Bulletin.

Cooke is managing director of web design agency Fortune Cookie, which has a track record of creating accessible websites for clients such as Legal and General. He has been elected chair of BIMA for three years, heading an executive board that also includes senior representatives of leading ad agencies, national newspaper websites, digital agencies and recruitment and skills firms.
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Communications, technology and broadcasting companies are currently carrying out “very little research” into the accessibility requirements of consumers and the needs of disabled people, a new report has found.

The report, based on interviews with 20 companies, was prepared by i2 media research for the Advisory Committee on Older and Disabled People (ACOD), a sub-group of the communications industry regulator Ofcom.
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A more solid European legal foundation is needed to enforce technology accessibility, a leading software expert from Yahoo! told E-Access 09.

Artur Ortega, ‘accessibility evangelist’ at Yahoo! Europe, said that ensuring more accessible products were developed would be a challenge, but that a legal basis for accessibility would actually impact positively on suppliers.
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Unasking The right Questions – By Bill Thompson.

Accessibility has always been an issue for information and communications technologies, but for most of the 60 or so years we’ve had stored-program digital computers, it was a secondary consideration.

Getting physical access to early computers like EDSAC and ATLAS involved being in the right room in the right city at the right time, whether or not you were a wheelchair user or had poor vision.
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Just 10 per cent of accessibility statements on local government websites are ‘excellent’, with a further 37 per cent deemed ‘satisfactory’, according to new research from the Society of IT Management (Socitm
www.socitm.gov.uk ).

The research is published this week as a special supplement to Better Connected 2009, the society’s annual snapshot review of all UK council websites.
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A method for presenting Braille characters as a sequence of strong and weak pulses on the touch-screen of a mobile device has been developed by a research team at the University of Tampere in Finland.

The most successful method tested by the team involved sending sequences of pulses about a third of a second apart to a single point of the screen of a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. Almost all participants could accurately recognise individual characters sent in this way, though faster speeds reduced the recognition rate.
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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has failed to adequately address accessibility problems with its new mobile web news service, one of the country’s leading accessibility analysts has told E-Access Bulletin.

Tom Worthington, a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University, examined ‘ABC Mobile’ (
www.abc.net.au/innovation/mobile )
for accessibility on its launch. In a report posted to his blog, he said: “The home page does not appear to have been designed in accordance with guidelines for web accessibility for the disabled, and may be unlawful. The site also fails several mobile phone and other web guidelines.” One of the key faults had been with a lack of proper alternative text tags for information conveyed as images, he said.
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An attempt to redefine or reframe the term ‘disability’, in the context of online learning as a mismatch between a learner’s needs and the education process delivered, is enshrined in a new international e-learning standard.

ISO/IEC 24751:2008, ‘Information technology – individualised adaptability and accessibility in e-learning, education and training’ (
www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1217 )
has been published by the International Organization for Standardisation (ISO) with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
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Readers of the eleventh annual Better Connected report on UK council websites, published last month by the local government Society of Information Technology Management (Socitm), might be forgiven for feeling that time has stood still.

Last year’s report found that only 37 out of 464 council websites (8%) attained the most basic level of accessibility, Level ‘A’ of the World Wide Web consortium’s (W3C) web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG 1.0) (
www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=164 ).
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