FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Digital Accessibility and Assistive Technology

Gorilla with mobile phone

Vision Impairment and marketing materials

Question

Just wondering how you consider the communication needs of your clients. We are people with severe vision impairment. I have a little bit of sight left and my colleague has none. When we go to networking events we are handed business cards and flyers. We can’t read them.
Someone always says that they can read it to us. However, what happens when there is no-one to read the information?
It is frustrating for us. We want to connect with people. 
 

Answer

We started a great discussion in the Providers of NDIS Services Support Page about communication strategies for managing business cards. Evie Wilson suggested using Seeing AI and ChatGPT. Jason Wilson suggested Braille cards. Both are solutions. However, the issue comes down to the number of cards and pieces of information that a person gets at a expo.
Firstly, only people that have been blind from birth or a very young age learn braille.  As you get older, like any language, it is much harder to learn and some of us do not have t he sensitivity in our fingertips to learn.
You really suffer from overload and get really overwhelmed when you have to go through each piece of paper.
The other issue is that giving a person with a vision impairment paper to read makes a bad impression. The same issue happens for a person with dyslexia, or dysgraphia, low motor issues and other sensory issues. The participant may ask questions such as if t his is the marketing information what is the service agreements and other information that they will need ongoing be like. Will they be digitally accessible?
The NDIS provider has really good information to give. They might be the services that the participant requires.
However, the participant will mostly go for a NDIS Provider that considers all the participants needs, including digital accessibility.
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Reporting Accessibility Issues

There will be times that you will find a website or a piece of documentation that is not accessible to you for various reasons.  The words might be too small to read, or the font that is used is hard to read.  The words might not be understandable by you or the website can’t be magnified without making the site unreadable. 

The first step in resolving this issue is to make a note of the date and time and the name of the website that you are viewing.  Take a screen shot by pressing “Print Screen” on your keyboard or take a photo.  Find the contact us page for the company involved and  email them with a photo and explain the accessibility issue.  Ask  if a meeting can be organised to discuss the accessibility issues.  If you do not get a good response then you have the right to contact the Human Rights Commission.