About the Principal

Background

Tim Noonan is the Company Director of Tim Noonan Consulting Pty Ltd (TNC). He has been consulting to industry, government, NGOs and educational institutions since 1995 when he established SoftSpeak Computer Services. Tim has worked for Vision Australia (formerly Royal Blind Society) for over a decade, focusing on making information and technology accessible to people with disabilities.

Tim has a B.A., majoring in cognitive psychology and special education. He is a member of two Standards Australia committees as well as having been involved with the Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium). He is a director on the Board of 2RPH (Radio for the Print Handicapped) NSW, and was a past board member of St. Edmund's School for Blind Children

Since 1993, Tim has been representing ATUG (Australian Telecommunication Users' Group) on the Standards Australia "Interactive Voice Response User Interface Requirements" Committee. He was also the convener for two years of the Round Table on Information Access for People with Print Disabilities Sub-Committee on "Electronic Information Access", which produced guidelines for preparation of ASCII documents for blind computer users. He also represented Australia on the International Committee for Accessible Document Design (ICADD).

Tim was commissioned in 2007 by the Human Rights Commission to author a report titled 'The Overlooked Consumers' on the access issues for people with disabilities and older people, frequently presented by consumer electronics and home appliances.

In 2007 Tim was contracted by the Australian Electoral Commission as their Usability Expert, to assist in the development of talking voting machines which will allow people who are blind or vision impaired to cast a secret and independent vote in the 2007 Federal Election.

In 2006-07 tim was engaged as an accessibility consultant by the Australian Bankers' Association to draft guidelines and advise on strategies to ensure that people with disabilities are not excluded by adoption of authentication technologies being deployed in the banking industry.

In 2006 Tim gave information and advice to the Bell Alient telco in relation to better integration of their several automated telephone services.

Tim was contracted to Griffith and NSW Universities as part of the “Smart Internet” Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) to specify user needs and features for the development of a prototype portable speech input/speech output mobile phone/PDA device for blind users and others in eyes-busy situations. He was also engaged to specify and refine the speech recognition and speech synthesis user interfaces for the device. (2003-04).

Tim was engaged as an electronic banking accessibility specialist by the Australian Bankers’ Association, to draft and develop four industry standards on the accessibility of ATMs, EFTPOS, Internet Banking and Telephone Banking. (2001-02), and has consulted for the Reserve Bank of Australia on the feasibility of developing an electronic polymer bank note identifier for blind Australians. (1996)

Tim was also contracted to undertake a major project for Blind Citizens Australia on E-Commerce and smart-card technologies focusing on improving accessibility of electronic banking and online shopping services for people with disabilities (1999-2000). He also researched and wrote a report for Blind Citizens Australia on the development of a braille-based text telephone for people who are deaf and blind. (1997)

Tim consulted to St.George Bank on IVR/ACD applications (including extensive scripting), voice-coaching Julie Anthony in voiceover announcing, and system usability evaluation.

Some of the key contributions Tim has made over the last 20 years to improve information access for blind and vision impaired Australians include:

Design and implementation for Vision Australia of three world-class fully-automated telephone-based information services:

Today's News Now: a fully automated service that uses synthetic speech to provide interactive telephone access to the full text of several daily Fairfax and News Ltd newspapers. (The TNN newspaper service was recognised by the Library Board of Victoria, and the Victorian Public Library Network as an example of best practice in the provision of library services. Details can be found in: Libraries Building Communities; Report Four: Showcasing the Best, State Library of Victoria, 2005.)
JobPhone: a fully automated service utilising synthetic speech and web-scraping to provide callers with keyword searching and full access to job listings from the mycareer.com.au website;
LibTel: a fully automated IVR library catalogue searching and browsing service providing live searches by author, title and subject interest area. It allows callers to hear book details and order books to be sent to them in the post.

Key features of these services include:

Natural speaking of phone numbers, dates/times, abbreviations, place names and proper names;
Ability to navigate and review spoken information by paragraph, sentence or word;
Ability to spell words and proper names;
Use of voice fonts to indicate context and facilitate navigation;
Context-sensitive help system; and
Automatic compliance with the Australian and New Zealand IVR user interface standard (AS/NZS4263).

planned and implemented the full in-house computerisation of Royal Blind Society’s braille transcription operations, and trained all staff in the new environment;

In 1993-4 Tim worked with external software developers to develop voice output user interfaces for custom Unix and PC-based business applications. This is documented in: Development of an Accessible Speech User Interface for People who are Blind or Vision impaired. (1994) Royal Blind Society http://www.timnoonan.com.au/atpap94.htm