Lobbying group report for the year ending May 2005

The make up of the committee remained the same as last year and therefore I was joined on the committee by Stuart Lawler, Brian Dalton and Bert Brown.
Again, each of us focused on a particular area where we felt that lobbying was required to improve accessibility to information and services for the blind and partially sighted.

I had felt for some time that the fact that the inaccessibility of Dublin Bus's online time tables was definitely worth our attention. To that end I contacted Dublin Bus and made them aware that their timetables had been inaccessible for 2 years or more even though that their web site stated that the timetables would be accessible "shortly". Dublin Bus responded that they were involved in a major restructuring of how their timetables were stored and accessed and that they did not think that their timetables would be accessible for at least 3 years. Obviously this situation was unacceptable and I pointed out to Dublin Bus that they were required under irish law to make reasonable attempts to make their services accessible. I also made it clear that If I didn't see any attempt to do this within one month that I would take an official complaint to the equality authority. Fortunately this seemed to have had the desired effect and Dublin Bus have now made a commitment to improve accessibility of their time tables and their web site in general. They are currently working with NCBI with a view to coming up with a plan for the best way of achieving these aims.

Having seen the talking ATM machine at the CSUN exhibition last year, Brian took on the task of investigating the possibilities of persuading Irish banks to implement similar systems here. He tried on a number of occasions to contact bank of America, who were the first bank to introduce talking ATM machines to the US, to seek further information but could not get any reply.

During my visit to CSUN this year I managed to get in contact with a representative of Bank of America who was willing to help us. Brian has subsequently been in contact with her, and has asked for access to a person responsible for the software to enable the speech and to try and get more technical information as well as the cost involved. She promised to put Brian in contact with a software engineer but so far nothing has materialised despite the follow up emails he have sent.

Obviously this project is going to take a long period of time before we will see accessible ATM machines in Ireland. However, having seen the benefits of such a system we believe that it is worthwhile putting in the effort to achieve this aim.

Bert has continued his work with the developers of the accessible phone pages software from Compass. We have seen a number of improvements to the software during the year and look forward to maintaining this relationship in the future.

Stuart has began preliminary work on investigating the accessibility of the online stores of some of the large super markets in Ireland such as Tesco and Superquinn. Following problems with the tesco accessible web site last year the need for a fully integrated web site encompassing the concepts of design for all was highlighted. We plan to maintain pressure on these large organizations and hope to see a time in the near future when everybody, regardless of their disability or otherwise will have the opportunity to purchase their groceries from a single accessible web site.

To Sum up, it has been another challenging year for the lobbying committee. Progress in some areas has been frustratingly slow, but we have made significant breakthroughs in other areas and look forward to continuing this work next year.