Multimedia Accessibility

The bridge was meant to be very solemnly inaugurated on Sept. 18, 2008, with the President of the Italian Republic attending. However, this ceremony was cancelled due to the protests of associations of people with disabilities, in particular of the Un ponte per tutti petition, because the bridge violates national accessibility norms, as it includes glass-covered stairs that exclude people in wheelchairs.

Finally, the absence of accommodation for persons with disabilities has been falsely attributed to Santiago Calatrava's supposed desire for a more pure design. This is simply not true. A number of designs were proposed that would have accommodated the needs of persons with disabilities. The decision to eliminate these accessibility options was made by the Comune di Venezia, which considered its existing system of transport for persons with disabilities to be entirely adequate, requiring that no special provisions for access were needed on this bridge.

The bridge has provoked its share of controversies, including concerns about the bridge's accessibility to locals and tourists in wheelchairs. (The city has promised to install "egg-shaped lifts" for the disabled, but whether they'll be more reliable than Venice's existing platform lifts is unknown.)

NPR, Harris Corporation and Towson University today announced a new initiative to make radio more accessible to the hundreds of millions of hearing and visually impaired people around the world.

Some people see the legal obligation to follow Web content accessibility guidelines - whether of the W3C or, in the US, of section 508 - as leading to boring text-only pages. Actually, these guidelines do not exclude the use of multimedia on the web. They say that multimedia should be made accessible by "Providing equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content" and in particular: "For any time-based multimedia presentation (e.g., a movie or animation), synchronize equivalent alternatives (e.g., captions or auditory descriptions of the visual track) with the presentation."[1]

Serves readers, pays writers: so far, so good. But there's another thing about Kindle 2 - its heavily marketed text-to-speech function. Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.

Using purely the public twitter API Dennis has created an accessible version of Twitter. The site http://accessibletwitter.com/ aims to fix all of the issues above and continue to support and advocate for twitter to be accessible to all. Below is the current progress of the project.

Welcome to Camera Obscura, the womb without a view http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/blind.html ...\n(skip to detailed site map)

Twitter has changed from being a tool most people thought is simply yet another way for people on the Internet to waste time to a platform for social change, social networking and dare I say it even business. One of the aspects that Twitter has been lacking is an accessible interface to the service. Thankfully Dennis Lembrée is changing all this. Schalk Neethling sat down with Dennis to learn more about Accessible Twitter, the problems he faces in creating it and what the future will hold.

Items Implemented\n * All links are keyboard accessible.\n * Simple, consistent layout and navigation.\n * Works with or without JavaScript.\n * Large default text size and high color contrast.\n * Looks great in high or low resolution.\n * Forms are marked up for optimal accessibility.\n * Code is semantic, light, and adheres to best practices in Web Standards.

google cached OCR of the JdG Vademecum image PDF

(a) A text equivalent for every non-text element shall be provided (e.g., via "alt", "longdesc", or in element content).\n\n(b) Equivalent alternatives for any multimedia presentation shall be synchronized with the presentation. ...

La Scuola Secondaria di I Grado "Dante Alighieri" dell'Aquila è sede del Centro Territoriale di Supporto per le Nuove Tecnologie e Disabilità, istituito con Decreto DGR Abruzzo prot. n. AOODRAB-2239 del 25.06.2007.