Western Australia has a beautiful, diverse and supportive natural environment that provides material, aesthetic and spiritual benefits. These benefits should be regarded as an essential part of the livelihood and quality of life of all Western Australians, including people with disabilities. People with disabilities are among the visitors to parks and recreation facilities managed by the Department of Conservation and Land Management. They are among people seeking information from CALM's public information counters and are included among departmental employees.
CALM is among the most decentralised State Government agencies, with approximately three-quarters of its workforce employed in country areas. Besides its Corporate and Operations Headquarters at Crawley and Kensington, CALM operates from nine Regional and 24 District and local centres, as well as from a number of other locations.
CALM is also the major provider of outdoor recreation areas and facilities in natural areas in Western Australia. As such, it is responsible for the management of several hundred recreation developments, ranging from day-use and camping areas to nearly 1800 kilometres of bushwalking, horse riding and other trails. CALM also organises and conducts various outdoor activity programs, and prepares and disseminates information to visitors and the general public in a range of formats.
In Western Australia, approximately one in six members of the community has a disability. Unfortunately, these individuals frequently experience difficulty in gaining access to facilities and services enjoyed by the rest of the community. CALM is committed to ensuring that people with disabilities are better able to access, use and enjoy our State's natural areas and the associated facilities, services and programs for the benefit of the entire community.
Since its formation in 1985, CALM has endeavoured to improve public access and upgrade or provide new visitor facilities and services suitable for use by all members of the community including people with physical and intellectual disabilities. Because of the size, remoteness and ruggedness of many of our national parks, State forest areas and other reserves, this has not been an easy undertaking. Nevertheless, CALM has made considerable progress and a significant number of recreation and tourism destinations throughout the State now have wheelchair accessible facilities such as parking areas, toilets and walkways. The NatureBase ParkFinder is an invaluable aid to finding out about some of the parks with universally accessible facilities.
CALM has also actively sought to provide job opportunities for people with disabilities and employs people with a range of disabilities at all levels of the organisation. As an equal opportunity employer, CALM is committed to seeing that people with disabilities are considered on merit in applications for employment, training and promotion, and that jobs and facilities are redesigned as required to remove any remaining barriers to employment and promotion.
CALM's second Disability Services Plan (2001–2006) has been developed in consultation with people with disabilities. The new Disability Services Plan proposes new directions to strengthen the impact of initiatives already in place. CALM will endeavour to make visitor facilities as accessible as possible to people with disabilities and their families. Continuous efforts will also be made to improve accessibility in all existing departmental offices.
Accessible NatureBase
NatureBase has been designed to be enjoyed by people who may use text-based web browsing software as an alternative to graphically oriented software. In addition, CALM has tested a number of software 'page readers' designed to 'speak' webpages to people who have difficulty reading them. In this regard, for users of Microsoft Windows 9x, the commercial product WillowTALK™ (opens in a new browser window) was found to work particularly well in reading NatureBase pages. Click here for a FREE download (30-day trial). (Opens in a new browser window.)
In addition, there is a freeware product called HELP Read, (opens in a new browser window) developed by the Hawaii Education Literacy Project. This product is FREEWARE and is available from for download - Download ReadZip1.EXE (1.3 MB)
For Macintosh users, outSPOKEN is a full-featured, commercial alternative to Macintosh SimpleText, distributed as a part of all Apple Macintosh operating systems and applications. (SimpleText provides text-to-speech output for any text copied by a user and pasted into the text space of the currently available SimpleText area). outSPOKEN is also available for Windows 9x users. |
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