Australian Broadcasting Corp Makes a Splash with Accessible Education

The Internet has become a major boon to education around the world. Students and teachers now have the world at their fingertips; instead of being restricted to outdated knowledge in textbooks or school catalogues, they can access millions of different resources online. The internet has helped bridge the education equality gap that can exist between those students that traditionally had significant access to education resources, and those less fortunate.

That is especially true of those with vision and hearing impairments, an area of education that has particularly been under-resourced over many years. In Australia alone, there are approximately 4,000 blind and vision impaired children according to Media Access Australia.

Thankfully, online video has the ability to significantly improve access to education for these students.

That’s exemplified in ABC Splash, a free digital education resource from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that provides educational content to all students, at every level and ability. While the service provides a mix of resources from online articles and podcasts, online video is at the core of ABC Splash, providing students with an interactive and visual way to learn. ABC adds new content daily to Splash, with approximately 2,500 videos available online so far. t’s not just the endless content catalogue that is important but the high-level accessibility features that gives anyone, including vision and hearing impaired users, the ability to enjoy and engage with the content.

Brightcove has a long standing relationship with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and we were pleased to partner with their Education division to deliver these features to ABC Splash users in a seamless and accessible way through our flagship Video Cloud offering. The new video player ensures all video content will be supported with closed captions, transcripts, keyboard navigation and screen reader support. Additionally, the entire website, videos included, is now compliant with accessibility standards, ensuring that ABC Splash’s content is available to more people than ever before. Lastly, through our Dynamic Ingest, we were able to ingest their entire video library in record time to ensure a timely launch that included simplifying their workflow which allows for geo-restricted and non-georestricted content in the same account as well as integration with their CMS.

ABC Splash is a great example of how Australian content providers are using technology to reach a wider audience and push accessibility forward, particularly for an audience that can often be marginalised. It’s an important and exciting initiative, and we’re glad to support ABC Splash in its push to make video accessible and open to all.