News and Achievements As part of our commitment to Australia's Signing People, ACARA aims to educate the Australian signing and non-signing community on the needs, desires and language diversity of Australia's signing people. In particular, but not limited to, the retail sector, which is most often the first contact point for Sign Language based resources and service information. In order to achieve this ACARA has been actively pursuing the following: Investigating and documenting every Sign Language Product. ACARA has established a massive database, already available to members, within the "login" section. All Sign Language products available within Australia are being identified as either "Not Auslan" (American, British, French etc) or "Auslan-Pending accreditation". All Auslan products will be reviewed by our esteemed accreditation panel. There findings are also published within the site. Over 200, of more than 2000 products have already been processed......MORE Addressing False and misleading product promotion. Many members have raised concerns regarding misleading, and generic based comments (such as "Sign Language" rather than "American Sign Language), within cover and promotional material. Even those with high levels of Auslan experience have bought products, based on cover or promotional material, believing the product was "Auslan", only to find later, that it was not. ACARA has already raised these concerns with a number of distribution and publishing bodies and had a number of products re-lablled......MORE Educating the retail sector. The first contact point Australians often have with Auslan is via the retail sector. The fact is that most retailers are unaware of the differences between Auslan and other sign languages and mistakes and misrepresentations often result. ACARA has begun a national AUSLAN awareness campaign within the retail sector to help rectify this situation ......MORE A small group of individuals have expressed concerns regarding the credentials of our esteemed accreditation panel. In the interest of transparency and integrity we have updated the 'Accreditation Panel' section of the site, to include a full list of each members' Auslan credentials and expertise. If you are interested in reading the original letter, received by ACARA and our response, click here