Mr. Desmond Kenny:

I am not on campus. I believe the Chair asked that we would indicate that. I hope I will not make any defamatory statements in the course of this presentation.

I am pleased to have been invited by the committee and to share the platform with AsIAm. It was interesting to hear Mr. Harris's presentation, which we will talk more about later on. It is important that our mutual complementarity and potentially conflicting approaches do not in any way conflict with the generality of improving the environment and making it accessible for all.

ILMI is an organisation comprised of disabled people.

We see ourselves as a disabled person's organisation, DPO, working on the lived experiences of disabled people. We are not associated or affiliated with any service provider. We recognise the great work they do but we are here to talk as individuals who consult with individuals and we are bringing the committee that lived experience. I will talk to the committee about one element of accessibility and Ms Gallagher will amplify that. On hand we have Mr. James Cawley, our policy officer, who can answer questions on the accessible environment.

I want to talk to the committee in the context of accessibility in a visual world. As a blind person, I rely on my ears, hands and feet - yes, my feet - to give me clues to and replacements for what might usually be regarded as visual. At the edges of steps you will notice dimpled surfaces; this is to tell me that I am confronting steps going up or going down. You will see the same dimpled surfaces at pedestrian crossings and along the edge of platforms in stations to demark the line beyond which it is not safe for me to venture. Audio crossings are present in all of our cities and most of our towns, telling me when it is safe to cross the road, provided no cyclist is coming that is. They have been growing in numbers since the mid-1970s and it is a tremendous assistance to the number of people who are blind or with low vision. It is reckoned that there are 200,000 people in Ireland with low vision. When you take into account the elderly, going up to the age of 85 and 90, there are 240,000 people with low vision, while there may only be 17,000 people like me who are totally blind. The number of those audio crossings has grown over the years.

Announcements on our public transport fleets, buses and trains help identify where I might be at any given time, that is when the announcements are working, which cannot always be guaranteed. New audio supports moving into use are audio description, AD, on film and TV. Some 10% of our home-produced programmes on RTÉ are targeted to be produced with AD built-in. AD tells me what the scene is composed and comprised of and what the people are doing when action is not happening in a clear sense. It tells me what people are doing by way of crying, frowning or looking into the distance. I can anticipate what members might be wondering about. For example, an audio clip from "Pretty Woman" announces to me that the couple are gone to bed and the blankets are moving. Much of the movie stock on Sky Digital contains audio description which can be switched on and off as required. Even the remote controls can be told where to navigate the channel selections to, with the selections talking back to me.

The following is an important point for the committee. An EU regulation now requires that all new electric vehicles, EVs, from the summer of this year should emit an electronic sound when they are travelling below 20 km/h, telling me they are present. Travelling in excess of 20 km/h the tyres are reckoned to emit enough noise for it to be clear that there is an EV present. That regulation is not yet being enforced in Ireland and the same expectation might be applied to ebikes and escooters for the same reason.

Another directive from the EU relates to web accessibility, which was touched on in part by Mr. Harris. This directive relates to the content on Government and local authority websites being accessible to screen readers for someone like me who is blind, and is capable of magnification for somebody with low vision. The directive is being monitored and encouraged by the National Disability Authority, NDA, and it is good to see the officials from the NDA here to give more guidance on that. It is an important directive.

In terms of touch, how many members of the committee will have picked up a pack of Panadol for their headaches or Gaviscon for their indigestion in the supermarket and noticed strange dots on medicine packs? These will not be present on the drugs in your local pharmacy. Those dots, which are Braille, also come from a European directive on medicines, obliging pharmaceutical companies to print in Braille the name of the medicine and its dose. All that I have described in brief, not unlike what Mr. Harris was talking about and in a similar context, is a web of assistance that exists to support me to know or to interrogate my environment or, in the case of medicines, to tell me what tablets I hold in my hand.

Publishers of books are obliged nowadays to have available digital copies of their publications which can be shared throughout the world to countries signed up to share print material and make it available to people who are blind or who may be suffering from dyslexia. Ireland has been signed up to this book share protocol since 2016. When I first started my college education in the 1970s, textbooks were not available as such. I had to have my books read onto cassette and I relied only on that and on lectures being spoken. There was no other means of having that available to me. Since then, in advancing my education in later years, I was able to do my course content and further education in digital form because of the availability of digital formats, which were available to me from the Open University. That format could be read by my computer, again using screen reader software.

I will move towards a conclusion. As the world evolves into more digital channels, I am told who is at my front door, how my thermostat is set and I can have Alexa or Google assistant at hand to tell me how I might need to spell something or to look it up. I can have it looked up and spoken back to me from Google. These are all part of the evolving new technologies of communication and contact. The committee can monitor these things passively as watchers of the evolution of it all or from time to time, as we are doing this morning, it can look at the failures of our planners to think about access when designing the environments which make up our interface with the world as an inclusive society where all disabled people, as Mr. Harris said, want to be and live in.

I call my colleague Ms. Catherine Gallagher to continue this presentation and to present how she finds the information gaps.