The Christopher Newell Prize recognises and commemorates the research and commitment of the late Revd Canon Dr Christopher Newell AM who was a strong advocate of the the needs of people with disabilities and their rights to access telecommunications during the 1990s and up until his passing in 2008. The Telstra sponsored award encourages authors to contribute original papers on how telecommunications can be used to assist people with disabilities. The independent Judging Panel (comprising Dr Mark Bagshaw, Barry Dingle, Professor Gerard Goggin, Wayne Hawkins, Robert Morsillo and the Managing Editor of TJA, as chair) assessed the papers that were submitted to TJA and four papers were awarded the Telstra-TJA Christopher Newell Prizes.

I co-authored a paper based on my Honours research with my two supervisors (Assoc Professor Denise Wood, from the University of South Australia, and Dr Parimala Raghavendra, from Flinders University), which is one of the four prize winning papers published in the May edition of the Telecommunications Journal of Australia.

The award winners are as follows:

First prize (with a cheque for $6,000) was awarded to Rob Garrett and Toan Nguyen from Novita Children’s Services, South Australia, for their article ‘Together we can find telecommunication solutions for people with complex communication needs’.

The authors of three papers were awarded equal second prizes ($3,000 each):

• Dr Katie Ellis of Murdoch University for ‘It means inclusion: a creative approach to disability and telecommunications policy in Australia’.

• Darryl Sellwood and Dr Denise Wood (of the University of South Australia) and Dr Parimala Raghavendra (Flinders University) for ‘Perspectives on the telecommunications access methods of people with complex communication needs’.

• Floris Müller and Marlies Klijn (of the University of Amsterdam) and Liesbet Van Zoonen (Loughborough University, UK) for ‘Disability, prejudice and reality TV: Challenging disablism through media representations’.

You can access the special edition of the journal from the Australian Computer Society Website: http://tja.org.au/index.php/tja/issue/view/18/showToc and the paper that I co-authored titled ‘Perspectives on the telecommunications access methods of people with complex communication needs‘ (Vol 62(2)9.1-29.11) as a free download.