A visually impaired student at Wits, Ari, recently asked Council to assist him and a group of fellow students with an accessibility issue with IOL newspapers. The Star used to have an accessible e-newspaper which he reads every day, but it has recently been changed to ‘better represent the look and feel of the printed newspaper’ –  which is a PDF document displaying the content as a picture – which is of cause totally inaccessible to screen reader users.

Council and Ari lodged complaints to the Independent Newspaper Group and their e-newspaper offers the accessible format as an option again. This just goes to show that one must make your challenges known, and often people and companies will accommodate you. It is often due to a lack of knowledge that these things happen, not because of deliberate discrimination.