Part Three: Sector news
This is the Office's email update of 25 November 2009.
14: Access Tourism in New Zealand website.
A new website, Access Tourism in New Zealand, contains news, reviews, and opinion pieces on Access Tourism. One of its goals is to promote the development of accessible tourism, travel, and leisure in New Zealand and the why providing easy accessibility for all makes economic, social, and sustainable sense. The website welcomes feedback, comments, articles, news pieces, or opinion pieces.
15: Canada broadcasts for disabled people
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has recently adopted a policy related to the accessibility of telecommunications and broadcasting services to disabled people. It includes relay services, emergency telecommunications services; mobile wireless services; customer information, service and support; closed captioning; and described video and audio description.
The Canadian Broadcast and Telecom Regulation requires broadcasters to provide audio description for all in-house productions. For people with visual impairments, such as people who are blind or have low vision, audio description and described video make TV programmes more accessible.
16: Risk Management in New Zealand Intellectual Disability Services
A recent report on the Risk Management in New Zealand Intellectual Disability Services: Balancing Control and Autonomy has been prepared by Alixe Bonardi. This report examines the approach to risk management in New Zealand, particularly in the context of services for people with intellectual disability.
Alixe Bonardi is Assistant Director of the University of Massachusetts Medical School's Center for Developmental Disabilities Evaluation and Research. She is a trained occupational therapist and has spent the past ten years working in disability policy research and development. During Alixe's Ian Axford Fellowship exchange to New Zealand she was based at the Ministry of Health in Wellington.
17: Google Accessible Search for the vision impaired
Google has added a new feature to its engine searches. You can now use the Google Accessible Search so that websites and pages that are friendlier to the blind and vision impaired are displayed first.
Google's methods for identifying accessible pages and content take into account the page's simplicity, how much visual imagery it carries and whether or not its primary purpose is immediately viable with keyboard navigation.
18: United Nations Enable newsletter.
The latest issue has information on:
1. Update on the Convention
2. Highlights from the UN system
3. Upcoming events
4. Civil society.
You can read about what the United Nations has planed for International Day of Persons with Disabilities, 3 December 2009. The Enable Newsletter is prepared by the United Nations Secretariat for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities with input from UN offices, agencies, funds and programmes.
19: Working Together More fund.
A new fund has been launched that may fund disability groups. In October 2009, the Working Together More fund - He Putea Mahi Tahi was launched. The goal of the fund is to assist community groups interested in working together more closely to do so, in order to make a greater difference for the people and communities they serve. The fund can provide seeding money and expertise. The Working Together More Fund is made up of four funding organisations - the Todd Foundation, Tindall Foundation, Wayne Francis Charitable Trust and the J R McKenzie Trust.
Applications for the first found of funding have closed. There will be more funding rounds in 2010, the next one closes on 12 March, so there is time to get things together for that.