EBU Member's Newsletter

News on the Marrakesh Treaty, the European Accessibility Act, Accessible lifts, and European Elections 2019.

Welcome to the 8th EBU Access Cast. This time Mario, Jakob, Bart and Tanja prepared lots of goodies for you from the news section, and we achieved our own personal record in amount of demos prepared for our podcast. We would like to say a huge thank you to Mr. Daniel Montalvo who sent us 2 demos about amazon Echo which we are publishing in this episode, and you can hear also the demo about Google Interpreter at the end of this podcast.

On 1 February, rail travel in Germany suddenly became more complicated for persons with disabilities in Germany. Deutsche Bahn, the main operator of railways and rail stations in Germany, announced that it would no longer organise mobility assistance for travellers with disabilities on all routes.

The low score of the European Parliament, a barely passing grade of 55.8 out of 100, was revealed in the new report “Democracy, Digital Accessibility and the European Union”, launched today by the European Disability Forum and Siteimprove. The report analysed the accessibility of the official website of the parliaments of the 28 Member States and included the European Parliament website.

This is not a surprise for persons with disabilities working in EU affairs. Complaints include lack of captioning in their livestreams, rendering them unusable for deaf or hard of hearing users, and pages that are not correctly marked, rendering them unreadable to blind and partially sighted persons relying on assistive technology, among others.

Blind Day is an annual event held on the 6th of the 6th (Israel’s equivalent of 20:20) when all are enlisted, the media, social organizations, volunteers, to talk candidly, expose their strengths and weaknesses, trials and tribulations and simply, show “a day in the life” of vision impaired adults and children. The aim is to raise the public’s awareness of the needs of Israel’s blind and those with limited vision by creating activities and experiences leading to a national understanding and conversation regarding the issues.