All about radio reading at the Media Lab – CBAA conference 2019

Want to develop a Radio Reading Program at your station?

Join our hands-on MediaLab session – powered by the CMTO – at the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia Conference in Melbourne next month.

We’re teaming up with the Community Media Training Organisation to help you diversify your audience, prepare your station for volunteers with disabilities, and start a radio reading service.

If your station already offers radio reading programming – we’d love you to come along and share your journey.

The session is presented by Kim Stewart, CMTO trainer and co-producer Only Human on 4ZZZ Zed Digital, and Bek Pasqualini, Strategic Communications & Projects Manager at RPH Australia.

Be inspired by community broadcasters and experts from across the country at the CBAA Conference 24 – 27 October 2019.

Bookings are essential – https://tinyurl.com/yyrao43w

Image shows Kim Stewart & Bek Pasqualini with the 2019 CBAA Conference program cover + text containing information outlined above.

Digital accessibility workshops coming up

Digital accessibility is about making your documents and website accessible to the widest range of users. That might include people who are blind, have low vision, are colourblind, have a learning or intellectual disability, or one of the 45% of Australians who have low literacy.

Vision Australia are offerring a range of courses to up your digital accessibility skills.

Including: Inclusive Design, Creating Accessible Documents: Word and PDF, Web Accessibility Techniques and Testing and more!

Check out their website for sessions in your city: https://www.visionaustralia.org/services/digital-access/training

New resources to help community radio better include people with disability

Community radio exists for everyone to have a voice. While there are some really great radio producers with disabilities in the community radio sector,  a real opportunity for voice still exists for many more!

For this reason, the Ability Radio Project’s Kim Stewart produced these guides with RPH Australia, the radio network providing Radio Reading services to the 34% of Australians with print disability. We want to encourage more people with disabilities to participate in community radio, and to help radio stations prepare for new volunteers.

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Reading radio scripts out loud with a screen reader

In my work with the CMTO I’ve been developing techniques to best assist learners in community radio who are using screen readers – ie.  people who are blind or have a vision impairment. Screen readers convert written text into voice, so that a user who is blind can ‘read’ the text, from top to bottom (as long as that text is formatted to be accessible, more about that here). Using a screen reader to read back a pre-written script in real time can be a challenge for some screen reader users, but worth the effort to become confident on-air.

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From the makers of the DAT now comes the WAT for accessible web dev

Those canny developers at Vision Australia last year made my life easier with their Document Accessibility Toolbar for MS Word that you can find here: https://www.visionaustralia.org/services/digital-access/document-accessibility-toolbar/

Now web developers  can try out their Web Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer here: https://www.visionaustralia.org/services/digital-access/resources/web-accessibility-toolbar-ie

“Diversity and inclusion” amongst a range of new one-day training courses from the CMTO

Four radio trainees at 4ZZZ stand together in a room with graffiti and posters
Trainees at 4ZZZ

Get some fresh training! The Community Media Training Organisation are offering a range of new short one-day training courses that can be adjusted to suit the accessibility needs of your volunteers.

If you are a station manager or decision maker, now is the time to write your applications for training funding.

Have a look at what’s on offer here:

http://www.cmto.org.au/courses/pathways-courses.html

Train your volunteers to be “disability aware”

The National Disability Co-ordination Officer program and ADCET offers free online training for workers and volunteers for “awareness of disability and the impact that societal attitudes and inherent stigma and discrimination have on the lives of people with disability” called Introduction to Disability Awareness. The course is FREE!

Continue reading “Train your volunteers to be “disability aware””