As central and local government departments push to meet the December 2005 deadline for delivering all their services electronically, many of the estimated 8.5 million disabled people in the UK are in danger of being disenfranchised because they cannot access these services via conventional IT.
"So far as e-government is concerned, the last thing people are thinking of is the disabled," says Justin Hammond, coordinator of a project by Leicester city council to make IT available to all.
Disabled people are more likely to have difficulty using standard PCs and to be in the 50% of the population who have no PC - often because they cannot afford the cost of a specially adapted system.
Some two-thirds of government services are now available electronically, but despite guidelines for public sector web designers drawn up by the Office of the e-Envoy, disability campaigners report that public sector websites are still failing to provide effective access to disabled people.
"I have come across websites by huge government de partments that are still not accessible," says Julie Howell, digital policy development officer at the Royal National Institute for the Blind.
"The government should be leading the way. If what government is delivering is bad practice people will copy it." Although operating systems such as Windows allow disabled people to adjust the appearance of text and images on screen, many people need special software and hardware to use a computer and can only access websites that have been designed to work with these systems.
For example, screen-reading software used by blind people to produce voice translations of screen displays can make little sense of a web page whose designer has not described the images on it in labels called tags. Similarly, web pages whose colours or font sizes cannot be adjusted are a closed book to many visually impaired people.
The Office of the e-Envoy, tasked with promoting the use of IT in society, has published a set of guidelines for managers of the more than 1,000 government websites called Guidelines for UK Government Websites.
The e-envoy wants all new and redesigned websites to apply World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative recommendations. "Unfamiliarity with the web or disabilities such as visual impairment will present fewer challenges to users," argues the Office of the e-Envoy.
"The vision is to develop an advanced 'human' technology interface that provides intelligent and natural language search capabilities, interaction through voice recognition and speaking pages."
Under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), organisations that provide services have been required to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, such as providing extra help or making changes to the way they provide their services, since 1999. But it is only in the last couple of years that websites and other IT systems have been regarded as being covered by the act.
So far, despite numerous surveys that have highlighted the shortcomings of public and privately run websites, no case against an owner of an inaccessible website has come to court, although there have been at least two out-of-court settlements for breaches of the act.
Last year, the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) carried out what is known as a formal investigation of 1,000 websites with the aim of highlighting barriers to web access and helping website operators to remove them.
Researchers used auto mated tools such as Bobby, developed by the Centre for Assistive Technology (CAST) and testing software developed by the World Wide Web Consortium to determine whether the websites met recognised standards.
The results of the exercise, which included close scrutiny of a sample of sites by 50 disabled people under laboratory conditions, are due to be published later this year.
However, the DRC does not intend to name any sites that fail to come up to scratch - much to the annoyance of disabled people - and it is unlikely that it will bring any prosecutions under the act.
The act also applies to systems that are used by disabled employees. The Department for Work and Pensions, which oversees the act, has set up a special IT unit that has the job of making sure that when the department's IT systems are updated, adaptations for disabled people are made at the same time.
Local authorities are also under pressure to consider disabled people in their IT plans. "The DDA is one of our 10 priority areas," says Tony Teehan, programme director of the Local e-Government Standards Body. "There is an enormous amount of confusion about what it means and what the implications of the act are for the way local authorities present their information."
Leicester city council is one of the few authorities that is already catering for disabled people as part of its e-government programme. With £3-4m from the government's Invest to Save budget for public sector efficiency improvement projects, the Leicester Disability Information and Communication Network has equipped eight centres in the city with suites of specially adapted PCs.
The computers, which are used by 600 disabled people, have aids including keyboards with oversized keys and devices instead of mice for controlling the machines.
The centres also have colour scanners and digital cameras. Leicester has commissioned 10 kiosks with an adjustable touch screen and keyboard, which will be placed in public places around the city.
The team of five people that run the project has developed a website with chat rooms, games, email and internet access. One of the unusual features of the programme is that it aims to produce systems that cover as many disabilities as possible.
There are eight different ways of looking at the website, for instance. To other authorities considering similar efforts, Justin Hammond, project coordinator, has some words of encouragement.
"It doesn't have to be costly. It just requires more thought. People think that what disabled people need from IT is way outside the normal way of doing things, but it isn't."
John Lamb is consulting editor, Ability magazine
