Posted to site December 8, 2010
In an effort to help travellers with disabilities plan their travel this holiday season, the Canadian Transportation Agency is pleased to provide one of its most popular publications, Take Charge of Your Travel: A Guide for Persons with Disabilities.
Take Charge helps Canadians living with disability to plan and conduct their travel plans with greater ease and confidence. It does so by describing accessible services and features available to persons with disabilities.
In addition to providing information such as what to look and listen for when travelling, Take Charge comes with a detachable reservation checklist. This step-by-step guide can help persons with disabilities plan their trip, with details on potential services in areas such as accessible seating, mobility and technical aids, as well as service animals.
Take Charge is available in multiple formats, including DAISY – a globally recognized digital talking book that allows greater access for people who are blind or have a visual impairment. The Agency is dedicated to offering its publications for persons with disabilities in multiple formats and has proven an industry leader in this respect.
The Digital Accessible Information System, or DAISY, format improves on traditional audio books through its enhanced navigation and search functions. With DAISY, a user can jump from point to point in the publication, just as a sighted user can flip from page to page. In most traditional audio books, the user can only move forward and backward.
The Agency is currently one of the few federal government departments to make available some of its key publications in the latest version of DAISY.
“Our goal is to keep our stakeholders informed about the Agency’s initiatives to ensure an accessible federal transportation network,” says Geoff Hare, the Agency Chair and CEO. “We feel that producing publications such as Take Charge and making them available in multiple formats, like DAISY, will help Canadians who have a disability make the most of their travel experience within Canada and abroad.”
This holiday season, if you are travelling by airplane, train, passenger ferry or interprovincial bus and have a disability, Take Charge can help you take the right steps to make your journey a more comfortable and enjoyable one.
You can find Take Charge of Your Travel: A Guide for Persons with Disabilities in multiple formats, including DAISY, at www.cta.gc.ca/eng/take-charge.
For a hard copy, contact the Canadian Transportation Agency at 1-888-222-2592, by TTY at 1-800-669-5575, by email at info@otc-cta.gc.ca or by mail at: Canadian Transportation Agency, Ottawa, ON K1A 0N9.
