Secondary Sight Launches!

Secondary Sight – a Dream Revealed

The Secondary Sight Project takes a step towards its goal of supporting inclusiveness in education through technology, when it launches its website at a function in Wellington on Monday.

The function will include student demonstrations of adaptive technology and online resources, showing how these can help level the playing field for students who are blind or visually impaired in terms of access to educational materials and information.

The Secondary Sight website provides a growing collection of guidelines, to help teachers create class resources which are accessible to all students. There are sections to help teachers with common computer applications, such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and for common digital formats such as PDF. There is also a section which helps teachers point their students toward online sources of books.

The guidelines were researched and posted by 'Net citizen’ and former broadcaster, Kylee Maloney, who draws on personal experience of access barriers for blind students, and is a strong advocate for making information accessible to all online.

The Secondary Sight project grew out of a technology camp with a group of blind and vision impaired secondary school students. Since the camp, the Ministry of Education's Inclusive website has hosted a student working group called the BLENNZ Tech Angels, where students create resources to help their blind and vision impaired peers in adaptive technology and it now hosts the home of the Secondary Sight Project itself.

Project supporters include

• the Blind and Low Vision Education Network of New Zealand,
• Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind,
• Wellington City Council,
• Ministry of Education, and
• technology companies Squiz and W3A Limited.

The Launch

When: Monday 4 August 2008 from 17:00 to 19:00

Where: Wellington East Girls College

What: launch of the Secondary Sight Project’s website at www.secondarysight.org.nz with active demonstrations of adaptive technology

Contact

Kathy Olsen
Director
Squiz Limited
Level 1, 14 Oxford Terrace
ddi: +64 4 939 4396
t: +64 4 939 0399
m: +64 27 480 8671
f: +64 4 939 4397
e: kolsen@squiz.co.nz

Kylee Maloney
Access Consultant
Secondary Sight
Newtown, Wellington, New Zealand
t: + 64 4 2359 559
m: +64 21 050 1764
e: kylee@timeless.net.nz

"The Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind congratulates the Secondary Sight team on the launch of their newest website. The Foundation hopes that by educating secondary school teachers about accessible information and adaptive technology, blind, deafblind and vision-impaired students will have a more positive and engaging learning experience.

Neil Jarvis, Executive Director of the Foundation’s team for Access, Innovation and Enterprise says, “It’s a great example of what can be achieved by a range of agencies in collaboration, and more importantly, by young people. We’ve been proud to work alongside the project in its development and welcome the website’s launch.”"