The Disability Information and Resource Centre

A web portal providing information about Sydney’s accessible tourist attractions has won the World Leisure Organisation Innovation prize for 2010 announced recently at the World Leisure Congress in South Korea.

The site, Sydney For All, was developed from research led by Associate Professor Simon Darcy from the UTS Faculty of Business.

For the full story visit http://newsroom.uts.edu.au/news/2010/10/international-award-for-accessible-tourism-website.

The Cerebral Palsy League (CPL) of Queensland has relaunched its website with text-to-speech software called BrowseAloud, giving Queenslanders with literacy difficulties, mild visual impairments and other complex difficulties greater access to online content.

With BrowseAloud, visitors to CPL’s website can have online content read aloud in a high-quality, Australian-accented voice, with each word highlighted as it is spoken.

For more info about BrowseAloud click here.

Click here for the Cerebral Palsy League of Queensland.

Australians with disabilities will soon find it easier to access government information online.

Minister for Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner and Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities Bill Shorten said the Rudd Government had endorsed new website accessibility standards, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.

“This is an important step in making democracy more open, accessible and accountable for all Australians,” Lindsay Tanner said.

“It will encourage and enable people living with disabilities to more fully interact with, and get services from government online.”

The new standard replaces WCAG 1.0, a mandated requirement for agencies since 2000.

More information can be found here.