S4E32 - Season 3 Episode 32 - How do political representatives view digital accessibility?

When you talk about disability, that's obviously my passion.

What are the changes there that you're looking at?

Well, there's a couple of things, and I know if we look at digital accessibility, making sure things like council documents, like bylaws and minutes and agendas and supporting information is all accessible, but also making information readily available to people with a disability and not putting the onus back on them to contact council and request accessible formats of things.

I'd also love to see Hobart physically improve its accessibility for people with varied disabilities.

I think Hobart's streets, if you have managed to get down here, can be pretty uneven and we're a pretty hilly city overall.

And so I'd like to see some changes around how we look at infrastructure to enable people with disabilities to be getting around our city and connecting more with community.

You talked about digital accessibility and making things more accessible.

What are the barriers that you're seeing around that?

Yeah, at the moment, I think there's a range of things, everything from buried information where it takes you quite a long time actually to find something on a council website.

right through to council papers being flat pdfs at times and then therefore not being accessible with accessibility tools that you might use like screen readers and then things like council meetings currently they don't have any for example live captioning or interpreting services so You can go ahead and watch the recording later, but of course that limits your participation live and limits how much you can actually go ahead and ask questions, for example, at question time or speak with counsellors about a certain issue.

That's actually a really good point.

I hadn't thought of that because, yeah, I mean, I live in Brisbane and I don't go to the council meetings, so I don't even, I don't know whether they're in line.

And the reason being, it's the accessibility.

It's just another barrier that I'd have to get past.

You're talking about not being able to access information.

What is the legal framework then in Hobart that should underpin this? Is there any? Yeah,

I think for memory, our Anti-Discrimination Act says that communication must be provided in an accessible format, but the onus is put on the person with the disability to actually request that accessible information and

You and I

will both know how busy life is generally.

Add in an extra step that you need to ask for and then maybe even follow up council for or any level of government for the documents or things that you need in an accessible format.

It's just a whole other hurdle that people don't have time or capacity for.

And it's...

I think the capacity is a big part of it, isn't it?

Because

I know for me, just in the last two days, the amount of stuff that I've had to deal with where it's inaccessible, I think if someone had to do it and as just part of their regular day, I think they'd start to get a bit frustrated, overwhelmed.