There's more to accessibility than meets the eye

For most companies, thinking about accessibility for people with disabilities means ensuring entrances are wide enough for wheelchair users, providing ramps and including lifts and ground floor facilities such as toilets in the building design.

But as more companies provide services electronically, promoting equality of access means following guidelines for designing websites and software programs as well as constructing bricks-and-mortar business premises.

Mr Cearbhall O'Meara, chairman of the Institute of Design and Disability and co-founder of the Visually Impaired Computer Society, is blind. Like other blind or visually impaired people, he uses devices known as screen readers - electronic voice simulators that read information on a web page and repeat it out loud to the user.

But if a website is built haphazardly or if designers fail to label images clearly, the pages become inaccessible.

"When I move a mouse onto an image, the screen reader tells me what it is," Mr O'Meara explains. "But there needs to be a tag called ALT-text embedded in the HTML code to tell me what the image is."

Omitting an ALT tag from an image is like bringing a sighted person into a library with nameless books, according to the Association for Higher Education Access and Disability (AHEAD). But many company websites still do it, says Mr O'Meara.

"Recently, I was booking a flight to Paris on the Ryanair website, which I was able to do, but I also had to buy the insurance for the flight through the website. The screen reader couldn't find it, though I asked a sighted person if they could see it and they could. There was just no ALT insurance tag on the button you are supposed to click."

He could have asked his sighted friend to buy the insurance for him, he says, but, determined that the site should be accessible to everyone under equality legislation, Mr O'Meara has notified Ryanair.com of the matter.

Other barriers to accessibility include arranging text in newspaper-style columns, use of colours next to each other that will appear the same to colour-blind users, and online advertising, which often takes the form of pop-up windows or other graphics that cannot be read by screen readers.

Another typical problem, according to accessibility experts at Dublin-based company Frontend, occurs when web designers do not label links correctly. Visually impaired screen reader users often listen to all the links on a web page first, to find out what actions are available to them.

If the links just say "click here" or "more info" instead of describing the page at the end of the link, they seem meaningless. The user has to listen to the whole content of the page to find out what type of information is available.

If a website has a complicated structure, the screen reader might not know where to start reading and where to end. "It would take an awful long time to navigate the site. You would have to listen to everything," says Mr Frank Long, head of consultancy services at Frontend.

User needs are a focus of product development for the company. "We think about the end user before we work on the design, and people with accessibility needs would be part of the user group," Mr Long says.

Making websites accessible is like making sites user-friendly, and just involves taking the process one step further.

Despite the desire of many business organisations to be seen as socially responsible and inclusive, accessibility needs "tend to be the last thing they look at", Mr Long says.

"Much of the uptake has been in the government sector because of EU guidelines that say that all government and public agency websites should be accessible," says Mr Long.

Frontend, which specialises in user-friendly, accessible web and software design, has worked with the National Disability Authority (NDA) on writing design guidelines for government websites.

But a certain "trickle-down" process has been occurring, he adds. "Businesses who have the government as a client are beginning to use accessibility features because they have to, for example in the e-learning sector or in banking.

As more services are available online, it seems like a natural progression to make these available to everyone." For Mr O'Meara, who has worked as an assistive technology consultant at Bank of Ireland, it's a case of "one step forward, two steps back". Although a number of companies are considering accessibility needs, others are ignoring a whole section of their potential client base.

One success story for the Visually Impaired Computer Society is that Microsoft operating systems are now accessible. "We've had years of wrangling with Microsoft, but we've managed to get them to listen to us," says Mr O'Meara.

So when Microsoft's Windows XP was introduced last November, the software giant was keen to point out its built-in accessibility features and compatibility with more than a dozen assistive technology products.

The software industry and companies with heavily used websites may take note of landmark legal cases in the US and Australia. In November 1999, the National Federation of the Blind in the US sued internet service provider AOL, claiming it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to provide access for the disabled to the site.

Similarly, the Sydney 2000 Olympics organisers were ordered to make expensive changes to their website before the beginning of the games after a complaint by a blind user was upheld by an Australian equality authority.