Helen Petrie's presentation stresses to us how access to information for disabled people is really poor- reminding us that they want to do the weird things on the web too!

Web-sites are considered a service so you might be even liable under the law in some cases if your web-site is not accessible. Regarding the history in accessibility - before the web you could take ascii string and convert it into synthetic speech dos, with unix, ascii text based command line systems.

In 1995 the first major screen reader for windows based on speech was called 'JAWS' which still has 80% of market in screen reading software.

What is an accessible web-site? What do people have to do to make it accessible for people with print disabilities or image disabilities? First of all starry back grounds are hopeless for visually impaired! (they don't have to be bland, vanillia or text only) put in skip navigation link, use mark-up for lists, headers and paragraphs, DESCRIBE the images! Visually impaired people want to learn about colours and distance, what is the image doing.

Provide meaningful, distinct links and good organisation of pages and sites
Get disabled people involved in testing your web-site, go and do this on the web-site and see what happens, then you will learn what a good user experience and an understandable web site for a print disabled person is.

In order to tackle design accessibility for users, we need a repository for excellent accessible web-design and more designers to be involved with this research.

www.bentoweb.org/surveys
BenToWeb is a project within the Web Accessibility Benchmarking (WAB) Cluster aimed to support the European public and private sector to implement the recommendations of the eEurope 2005 Action Plan by providing new software modules and methodologies that satisfy some of the accessibility recommendations of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which are not analysed by existing tools due to their inherent complexity.