Richard Hamon has hundreds of pages of documents to sift through in his case before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT). Legally blind due to a degenerative genetic condition, he is seeking more funding under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) to allow him to travel for specialist vision assessments so he can purchase a assistive technology.

Meanwhile, it needs the AAT documents in audio format. He’s been asking for this for 18 months that the case has been in court. When he finally received them, he found that instead of hiring professional readers, who grade paragraph sections to allow listeners to stop, start and skim through the documents, Hamon says they were read by the staff of the National Disability Insurance Agency. The 17.5 hours of recordings feature player skipping too close to the microphone, distortion, and no way to jump to page or paragraph sections.

“It’s excruciating to listen to,” says Hamon Crikey. He says the NDIA argued that professionally producing the audio files would cost too much. “I raised the concern from the start that they would not meet accessibility standards.”