Blind Citizens Australia

Graeme Innes speaks with Sarah Bolton, who whilst spending much of her life in Canada has lived in Australia for several years now. They discuss the difference in blindness services as well as attitudes to people who are blind or vision impaired and how they differ between the two countries.

Graeme Innes speaks with David Saxburg and Paul Price from BCA's Brisbane branch. The Brisbane branch took a positive approach to Covid-19, to include the broader Queensland Community for social, online, gatherings.

In this week's episode, we speak with John Simpson, BCA president, and CEO, Emma Bennison about the upcoming Annual General Meeting of Blind Citizens Australia. Find out the time and date for the AGM, who is up for re-election this year and how the election process will be managed.

In this week's episode we hear from Sally Aurisch about the upcoming BCA Connect event. Find out what will be featured, how you can register and more. As well, we hear from Stephen Belbin about the upcoming Aboriginal Blind People's forum, coming up on the 30th of September.

In this week's episode, we speak with Sophie Wild from Guide Dogs Victoria. Sophie joins us to discuss a new community hub which has been developed to promote peer support and information sharing foir blind and vision impaired people across Australia.

This week we hear from Dale Cleaver, CEO of Guide Dogs NSW/ACT, about an interesting role currently being advertised by Guide Dogs Australia.

In this week's extended episode of New Horizons, Graeme Innes joins us to ... well, turn the tables on Vaughn Bennison, our regular New Horizons producer and presenter. Vaughn has produced New Horizons now for nearly five years, and at the request of some of our regular listeners, Graeme hijacks the programme to find out a bit about Vaughn's life.

We speak with Dianna Kube and Rikki Chaplin from Blind Citizens Australia about an upcoming discussion to inform BCA's work on addressing the needs of members living in "thin market" areas. Find out how you can attend to make your views known, and precisely what is a "Thin Market".

In this episode we speak with Graeme Innes and Susan Thompson about a successful move to get acess for blind and vision impaired Sydney travelers, to the AIRA service. They discuss how this can take the stress out of train travel and how else the service might be used.

In this week's programme we speak with New Horizons regular, and BCA staff-member, Rikki Chaplin. Rikki has been working hard on putting together a response paper to submit to the Royal Commission on the abuse, neglect, violence and exploitation of people with disabilities. Hear about Rikki's paper and the response he hopes to receive from the commission.

Thank you to the person who reminded me that I had neglected to republish part II of Padraig Naughton's interview, from 2016. Padraig visited Australia some years ago from Ireland, and we took some time to discuss the differences, at that time, for blind and vision impaired people, between our two countries. Also some more good news for watchers of audio described television.

This week we speak with Belinda O'Connor from Bioptic Drivers Australia. Hear about Bioptic driving, and the establishment of a legal framework to promote bioptic driving and make it easier to be assessed as a bioptic driver.

We harken back to episode 459 in this week's episode. Ahead of some news for Sydney branch members, we replay an interview from 2016. Graeme Innes, no stranger to New Horizons and to BCA generally, published his book around then. If you've not read it yet, here's a great opportunity. Graeme tells us of his motivation to write the book, and a bit about the process.

The focus this week is on the upcoming edition of Blind Citizens News, Blind Citizens Australia's quarterly magazine. Ahead of an interview with editor, Jonathan Craig, we bring you this edition's editorial.

Audio description is again our feature on New Horizons this week. We speak with Will McRostie from Melbourne, about Description Victoria, and a really interesting partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria.

In this week's programme we speak with returning guest, and BCA staff-member, Angela Jaeschke. Angela discusses her new role, and informs us of the impending commencement of a long awaited service! Also, Angela discusses some issues papers which BCA is currently formulating a response on.

We speak, in this week's episode, with Dianna Kube, and Tim Haggis, both of whom joined BCA two weeks ago - Dianna as Policy and Advocacy Team Leader, and Tim as Membership Development Coordinator. Find out about their background, and their views for the roles they have taken on.

This week we speak with Philip and Tess from the Australian Network on Disability. The describe an interesting opportunity for blind or vision impaired students, and an ongoing mentoring programme.

This week brings us the second part of our discussion from Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Andrew Arch, principal consultant with Intopia, talks about changes he's noticed, and what it has taken to get where we are in terms of digital access. Apologies for the audio dropouts, despite these I thought it was well worth bringing to you.

This is the audio edition of Blind Citizens News, for April 2020. It has been broken up into chapters for your convenience. It is narrated and produced by Glenn Morrow.