29 Sept, 2015

City of Adelaide Making Information Accessible To All

City of Adelaide continues to make its information more accessible and widely available to all of the community with the introduction of ReadSpeaker technology to its website.

ReadSpeaker is a new text-to-speech technology where the text on the screen is vocalised, enabling people with reading difficulties to access the content and easily navigate the site to find the information they’re after.

City of Adelaide Lord Mayor Martin Haese said that this was another step toward ensuring everyone in the community has easy access to Council information.

“Last month we introduced real-time online video streaming of our Council Committee meetings. This enables people to view the meeting proceedings via Council’s website, allowing for all members of the community to have easy access to Council’s debates and decision-making as it happens.

“Now with the introduction of ReadSpeaker technology, with just one click people who have difficulty reading web pages can find out what’s happening in the city, get help on starting a business or discover community programs near them by listening to the content.

“Providing this technology is part of Council’s commitment to improving accessibility to our services for all people who live in, work in or visit Adelaide.”

Users can access the text-to-speech feature on all browsers on both Macs and PCs by clicking on the ‘listen’ button at the top right hand corner of the screen. They are also given the choice to listen straight away, or download and listen at a later time.

City of Adelaide’s entire website has now been brought into line with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, which provide a range of recommendations to make web content accessible to people with disabilities.

These recommendations include providing text alternatives for any non-text content so that it can be changed into other forms that people may need, such as large print, Braille, speech, symbols or simpler language, making it easier for users to see, hear and find content, and making text content readable and understandable.

All of these actions form part of Council’s Access and Inclusion Strategy. More details on the strategy can be found at cityofadelaide.com.au/your-community/community-development/access-inclusion/.

Paula Stevens