Dr. Aideen Hartney:

I echo what Mr. Kenny said. It is more helpful to think about a collaborative and a shared approach than different groups pitting themselves against each other with their varying needs. The beauty of a universal design approach is that it can accommodate the full range of experience. On the question of a register, we would very much advocate that it should be for people to declare and decide whether they wished to declare they have a disability for themselves. Many people wish to keep it private or do not consider they have a disability if the barriers in society have been successfully removed for them. If we got to a universally designed world, we probably would not need these data-collection mechanisms.

We have not been approached to engage directly with the Oireachtas to make it an autism-friendly building, but we would be very open to doing so. Dr. Fitzpatrick and Dr. Craddock might have some points to make regarding guidance we would have in that regard. In our web accessibility directive monitoring nobody achieved compliance. The Oireachtas website was one of the strongest performers we found in that first report and I congratulate it on that. Does Dr. Fitzpatrick wish to make some points about acoustics?