The following is a direct extract from The Age.

Disability Services:

• $1 billion over four years for rollout of National Disability Insurance Scheme.
• First stage of scheme to begin in mid-2013 for about 10,000 Australians with a significant and permanent disability in up to four “launch” locations in Australia.
• From mid-2014, scheme will be expanded to bring the total number of eligible people up to 20,000.

Breakdown of funding for the NDIS:

• $342.5 million over three years from July 2013 to help with care and support for people with a disability.
• $240.3 million over four years to build and operate an NDIS information technology system.
• $154.8 million over three years to employ local area co-ordinators to help with one-on-one care for people with a disability.
• $122.6 million over four years to help prepare the disability sector for delivering care under the NDIS, particularly in the launch locations for the first stage of the rollout.
• $58.6 million over three years from 2013-2014 to assess people with a disability in the launch locations to determine their eligibility for the scheme and level of care needed.
• $53 million over four years from 2012-13 to establish a National Disability Transition Agency to coordinate the care for people in the launch locations.
• $18.3 million over four years from 2012-13 to continue the Commonwealth taskforce advising the government on the development of the NDIS.
• $11.7 million over four years from 2012-13 for research into early intervention to improve support for people with a disability.
• $5.2 million over four years from 2013-14 to evaluate the scheme in the launch locations.
• States and territories that host the launch sites will have to contribute to the cost of care and support for people with a disability.

Read more at The Age – How the budget affects you.

I’m excited!

Check out their web site and program. With four streams, there’s sure to be something for everyone.

For a sneak-peek at what I’ll be talking about – it won’t be a standard presentation after all; it will be a keynote (!) – see the article in ITWire.

If you would like to see Accessibility Week at another location, register your interest.

Melbourne Accessibility Week – Dates

6- 10 February, 2012

AccessibilityOz is launching Melbourne Accessibility Week. Register now!

Monday: Full Day Seminar

AccessibilityOz founder Gian Wild presents the steps your organisation should consider undertaking to meet next year’s Government mandate and draws on 13 years of experience in accessibility to address topics including the differences between WCAG1 and WCAG2 standards, PDFs in the context of accessibility and updates to the DDA: Web Advisory Notes.

Attendees will get both an overview of the direction of accessibility and how it impacts their organisation as well as specific trends observed in sites undertaking compliance audits.

Hear from a panel of Government representatives who have undertaken the process to become WCAG2 compliant and how their organisations addressed the issues surrounding accessibility.

Draft program

Please note that this program may change in the future.
9.00- 9.30: Registration
9.30- 10.15: Accessibility Basics
10.15- 11.15: Victorian State and Local Government Accessibility Requirements and the Victorian Government Accessibility Working Group
11.15- 11.30: Morning tea
11.30- 12.30: The National Transition Strategy
12.30- 1.15: Lunch (provided)
1.15- 1.45: PDFs and accessibility
1.45- 2.15: Dealing with documents Panel: The PDF issue
2.15- 3.15: Demonstration of automated testing tools (IBM Policy Tester, HiSoftware Compliance Sherriff, Funnelback WCAG Compliance Tester and SSB Bart Group AMP)
3.15- 3.30: Afternoon tea
3.30- 4.00: Accessibility when building a new site Panel
4.00- 5.00: Changes between WCAG1 and WCAG2

Training

Tuesday: Microsoft Word Training (1/2 day)

This session will provide participants with tools to produce accessible Microsoft Word documents.

Wednesday: Writing Accessible Content (1 day)

This session is geared towards content authors and provides participants with specific guidelines to write accessible content that is WCAG 2.0 compliant.

Thursday: Developer Training (1 day)

This session is geared towards website developers and provides participants with specific instructions and code to produce an accessible website that is WCAG 2.0 compliant.

Friday: Adobe PDF Training (1 day)

This session will provide participants with tools to tag Adobe PDF documents. The training covers PDFs developed from Microsoft Word as well as from a scanned document.

Costs

The Full Day Seminar is $350 excluding GST.

Each training day is $500 excluding GST. The 1/2 day training is $250 excluding GST.

Early Bird pricing

Register before 31st December 2011 and receive a 10% discount:

• $315 excluding GST for the Full Day Seminar, and
• $450 excluding GST per training day. The 1/2 day training would be $225 excluding GST

Full week discount

To register one pass for the full week (you can send different people to different days) is $1,800 excluding GST.

Early bird discount: $1,500 excluding GST (register before 31st December)

Register now!

(Hint: Never!)

Accessing Higher Ground is an accessible media, web and technology conference focussed on tertiary education. Gian Wild spent five years working with Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and as part of her work reviewed the accessibility of various Learning Management Systems such as Sakai, Moodle and Blackboard.

The first of these articles is now live at Sitepoint.com: The hidden nuggets of WCAG2. Enjoy!

the work I had done with Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games. In 2009, I was asked back and talked about the introduction of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.0 – a presentation that was quite controversial at the time!

This year I’m speaking about the hidden nuggets of WCAG2. Keep an eye on this blog – I will be posting the nuggets here soon!

Gian Wild speaking at Web Directions South in 2006

You can download the PDFs and accessibility presentation (PPT 647KB), or read the following blog posts (which contain all and more information than the presentation):

• Part 1: A few problems with the concept of accessible PDFs
• Part 2: A few problems with the concept of accessible PDFs
• Between a rock and a PDF (results of the AGIMO PDF enquiry)
• Australian Human Rights updates their Web Advisory Notes
• AGIMO has released ‘Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy’

I also referred to the following:

• eGovernment Accessibility Toolkit