Lobbying group report for the year ending May 2004

Having taken over the chairmanship of the lobbying group after last year's AGM, I set about re-organising the group as several members had stepped down. I wanted to create a small but focused group and to that end I asked Stuart Lawler and Brian Dalton to participate. More recently we were delighted to add Bert Brown to the group.

The work of the group can be divided into 3 main areas:

1 To lobby irish banks to introduce accessible ATM machines into Ireland.

This work has progressed very slowly. However, we have recently acquired information from Bank of America who have introduced talking ATM machines in the US. We hope to use this information to encourage irish banks to follow suit.
Earlier on in the year reports appeared on several mailing lists claiming that there were already some talking ATM machines in the country. But if I can be allowed to misquote Mark Twain, as far as I can ascertain the reports of their existance is greatly exaggerated.

2 The second avenue of investigation which we explored was that of the text to speech service provided by Eircom.

This service allowed a person to listen to text messages sent to a phone. The drawback of this service was that it was only available on land line phones. We wondered if it would be possible to extend this system so that a user could listen to text messages sent to a mobile phone. After further enquiries, it appeared that eircom were still testing this system. They claimed that significant problems remained whereby messages were lost and/or duplicate messages were sent. However, I understand that recently things have improved thanks to Vodafone signing up to the service. Apparently Vodafone have a lot more expertise in this area and this knowledge is being used to improve the service.
Eircom now say that text to speech is up and running but only for users who have call answering installed, and who use the old style of landline phones which have no texting facility. Therefore, users who have the newer portable phones won't be able to use this service.
We would need to approach the various mobile operators to see if they planned to introduce this facility. However, as eircom won't provide it to users using phones which can receive text messages, it seems unlikely that the mobile operators would introduce it at all.
Of course, with the recent arrival of screen readers for mobile phones this service may not be as necessary as previously thought. Having said that, it offers a cheaper alternative than that of buying screen reading software and an expensive mobile phone.

3 The last major issue we looked at was one which has been in the news a lot recently and one of interest to many blind people i.e. electronic voting.

I have been in contact with Michael Murphy in the department of Environment for the last two years regarding this issue. I initially saw EVoting as a technology which could enfranchise blind and visually impaired people. At last, we would be able to cast our vote in an accessible, independent and secret manner. However, as time has passed yet again we realise that minority concerns are being brushed aside, supposedly in the interest of time and cost.

To that end, I put together a submission to the forum of people with disabilities outlining vics's position on Evoting. My proposal was based on my own views and experiences and those gleamed from vics members via the vics mailing list. The forum used this submission along with those from other disability bodies as part of their presentation to the commission on electronic voting.

Our proposal outlined what we felt the advantages of electronic voting were to people if the machines were completely accessible. However, we stressed the point that electronic voting in its current form not only made it impossible for totally blind people to cast their vote independently, but it made the situation significantly worse for partially sighted people, who up to now were able to read printed ballot papers, but would find the new machines difficult to use.

As I'm sure you are all aware, electronic voting will not now happen in June, hopefully thanks in some small way to our lobbying. Not withstanding the well known concerns with electronic voting such as security and the lack of an auditable paper trail, I believe that if the system is implemented in the correct manner it offers a great step forward for democracy for all in this country.

Finally, thanks to the work of Bert Brown I'm delighted to announce that all vics members will be entitled to a free cd containing the compass phone directory. The compass software is completely accessible and has specially been modified to allow screen reader users to navigate the screens more easily. I'd like to commend Bert and the developer of compass for the work they've put into this, and it shows what can be done if we work together to improve accessibility for all. To sum up, it has been another busy and challenging year for the lobbying group. We have had some success during the year, but as usual much work remains to be done.

Tim Culhane