Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I, and on behalf of Senator Fifield, move:

That the Senate—

(a)

acknowledges the success of the Deafness Technology Demonstration Forum in Parliament House on 19 August 2009, and notes the interest expressed by parliamentarians in technologies to enable deaf students to better participate in mainstream education;

(b)

draws the attention of senators to recent progress in further development and application of the ‘Ai-Live’ system, which combines voice recognition software with trained re-speakers to deliver real time word accurate text translation or captioning of speech to the student and its successful application in schools and further education;

(c)

recognises the transformative impact that technology has had on the engagement and learning of deaf students with access to the technology, who as a result are now able to understand and follow what their teacher or lecturer is saying in real time;

(d)

notes that state and territory education departments have indicated in principle commitment to a national pilot of Ai-Live in high schools, which would see them meeting 75 per cent of the costs; and

(e)

calls on the Federal Government to provide supplementary funding, to cover technology, infrastructure and support costs, to enable a national pilot of Ai-Live to commence.