Lobbying group report for the year ending May 2006
The last year has been another busy and quite productive one for the lobbying group.
We have concentrated on two specific issues, related to things I’m sure we all feel we have too little of, namely time and money.
Improving access to banking services has been one of the central goals of the lobbying committee. To this end, during the past year VICS has worked closely with National Irish Bank, who were willing to run a pilot project using talking ATM machines. In September the first ever fully accessible ATM machine was installed in NIB’s branch at Baggot street in Dublin.
The feedback from the pilot has been overwhelmingly positive, and NIB has given an undertaking that this machine will remain in place.NIB have recently been acquired by a Danish bank and as a result of this their ATM network is receiving a major overhaul. All new ATM machines which are installed will contain the hardware to make them accessible. The necessary software required will not be installed until NIB are happy that the change over from their old ATM system is successful. Having said that, we have always found NIB to be very proactive in their attitude to accessibility and hope that the necessary software will be installed in time.
The lobbying group drafted a paper outlining the benefits of accessible ATM's both to banks and banking customers (disabled or otherwise). Through our links with some of the major banks here in Ireland, we have fed this paper directly to departments specifically concerned with ATM's. So it is now in the hands of relevant bank managers who are in a position to make decisions on this subject. It also has been given to the Irish Bank Officials Association, who are in effect the union concerned with Bank Employees and to the Irish Bankers Federation who represent the banking management.
I’m delighted to say that we have had encouraging feedback from one of the largest banks in the country, and will continue to push for the availability of fully accessible banking for all in the future.
The second major topic that the committee looked at this year was time tables. At our last AGM I reported that we were looking into the inaccessibility of the Dublin Bus time tables. We continued to apply pressure to Dublin Bus and As I’m sure you are now aware, a fully accessible time table is now available via the text only version of the Dublin Bus website. This allows visually impaired people to search for bus time tables either by bus number or by destination.
This development is to be welcomed, although we see this solution as only an interim one. Ideally we want to see a complete revamp of the Dublin Bus website and a new fully accessible version developed. We continue to work with Dublin Bus in this regard.
Finally we come to the problems of access to the online time tables from Irish Rail. I’m sure that many of you are familiar with how difficult it is to use the new irish rail website. On 3rd February last I wrote a letter on the behalf of vics to Irish Rail. In the letter I outlined the issues we had with the usability of the website and stressed the negative effects the lack of a time table service had on our members. I also mentioned that if the situation was not rectified, then we would have to consider what further action we could take. In the reply from the company they acknowledged that there was a problem, but gave no indication as to when the situation would improve.
Since then VICS has been in Discussion with the NCBI as to the best way to resolve the issue. NCBI through the Centre For Inclusive Technology have offered Irish Rail a free accessibility audit of their website. As far as I’m aware, they have yet to receive a response to this offer.
Irish Rail are bound under irish law to make their services accessible to all. Given this, I feel that we have a very strong case if we do decide to thake this matter to the courts.