The RNZFB website has won the Best Subscriber/Special Interest award at this year's Qantas Media Awards. The awards recognise excellence across all disciplines in New Zealand journalism. This is the first time this award has been presented in the 34 year history of the awards. Commenting on the website, the judge said the site sums up the potency of the new digital age: access to all, information that everybody – literally everybody - can use.

"It had everything that you find on this kind of site; plenty of information, plenty of news and helpful advice," said the judge. "You expect it; and then you think, hang-on, many of its users are blind or severely vision impaired. What's with offering them a website? Which you have to see, surely?"

"And it is here that I was moved by what it offered;  this was the digital age, the new media, embracing people who for so long have been excluded, who have needed talking books and braille and all the special devices that cost so much," concludes the judge. 

Paula Daye, RNZFB CEO says the award is testament to the hard work of many RNZFB staff, and the judges' comments truly reflect the Foundation's approach to providing equal access to information for blind, deafblind, vision-impaired and fully sighted people, from New Zealand and around the world.

"I'm incredibly proud of the team responsible for the website, and I congratulate everyone involved. Its development broke new ground in New Zealand in terms of accessibility and continues to be a benchmark for website accessibility best practice," says Paula. 

This award follows the presentation in early 2006 of New Zealand's first Accessibility Accreditation Award to the RNZFB's website from AccEase, a company specialising in web accessibility.