Category Archives: Accessibility

Global Accessibility Awareness Day

May 9 is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), which has been created to promote greater awareness about Digital Accessibility to all individuals.
In support, all Australian Government departments are encouraged to help promote greater digital accessibility and to focus on educating users this week. A range of participation activities are suggested on the Global Accessibility Awareness [...]

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Accessibility in Social Media

For some time we’ve been talking about Accessibility in Social Media and have provided lots of tips on how to make the Government’s use of Social Media more accessible for people who may be using adaptive strategies or assistive technologies.
To add to the growing compendium of advice in this area, the US Government recently released some [...]

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Accessibility in the Procurement Process

Recently the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) released a report on Accessible Communication – tapping the potential in public ICT procurement policy. It highlighted the importance of, and recommended, the inclusion of accessibility criteria in public procurements.
We have just released some guidance about Accessibility in the procurement process, specifically relating to the [...]

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FaHCSIA’s web accessibility video

This contribution comes from the Web Operations Team at the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services & Indigenous Affairs.
December 2012 will see AGIMO’s first deadline for all Australian Government agencies to meet WCAG 2.0 Level A requirements as outlined in the Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy (NTS).
Earlier this year, the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and [...]

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PDF Accessibility becomes ISO standard

In January this year, I blogged about the Release of WCAG 2.0 Techniques for PDF. The publishing of these PDF techniques by the W3C gave us formal guidance for the creation of highly accessible PDF documents. In a parallel move in the standards world, ISO have recently released ISO 14289-1:2012 Document management applications – Electronic [...]

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Video and transcripts of Microsoft accessibility training sessions

In May 2012, AGIMO and Microsoft partnered to deliver two training sessions for APS staff focused on improving the accessibility of documents created in Microsoft Office.
The video and transcripts from these sessions, delivered by Daniel Hubbell of Microsoft, are now available for those who were unable to attend the sessions or who might simply like [...]

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Microsoft Office Accessibility Training Sessions for the Australian Government

In a similar manner to the Adobe education sessions run 12 months ago, Microsoft will be running two training sessions in Canberra on optimising the accessibility of Microsoft Office documents. These sessions will primarily focus on Word, however PowerPoint and Excel will also be covered. The sessions have been designed specifically for Australian Public Service [...]

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Release of WCAG 2.0 Techniques for PDF

On 3 January 2012, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) published updated Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, including new techniques for the Portable Document Format (PDF) and Silverlight, and an update to Understanding WCAG 2.0.
With these new techniques now released, agencies need to incorporate as many of them as practicable, as [...]

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e-Publication accessibility

Recently the Australian Security Research Centre hosted an information sharing session on “i-documents & other e-publications”. It included information on a range of e-publishing trends including the use of EPUB and various other formats and their application in the government context. I spoke about accessibility and e-publications, and how the principles of accessible information apply [...]

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Reaching all the people: an accessibility update from AGIMO on Thursday 27th October 2011

AGIMO’s Accessibility team would like to invite you to an upcoming web accessibility seminar, “Reaching all the people: an accessibility update from AGIMO”, to be hosted at University House on Thursday 27th October 2011.
As part of the Australian Government’s commitment to improved Web Accessibility, AGIMO is hosting a full day seminar for Australian Government web, [...]

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