Technology has the potential to significantly improve ac cess to information, but only if it is well designed, with the visually impaired user in mind. One of the major research areas that I have been involved with during the past year at the Library and Information Commission has been to improve library and information services for blind and visually impaired users.

There have been some pluses this year. The World Wide Web Consortium's Accessibility Initiative (www.w3.org/WAI/GL) is a new standard of 66 prioritised design rules. A good designer should be following these rules anyway, but the free Bobby software from the Center for Applied Special Technology (www.cast.org/bobby) automatically analyses web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities. It is very encouraging that the CCTA is using Bobby on the open.gov web pages.

From the librarian's perspective, the £200,000 that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has allocated to the LIC for improving the accessibility and content of services for the visually impaired is extremely welcome. We have been working with the Share the Vision consortium to commission projects from updating the National Union Catalogue of Alternative Formats and setting up a national interlending scheme, to personalising front ends. This work has been spurred on by the requirement of libraries to conform to Phase 3 of the Disability Discrimination Act which came into force on 1 October ? itself another positive event. There is now a requirement to offer everyone the same access to services.

On the minus side, screens and functionality of information services are becoming ever more complicated. Just because you can do something fancy, that doesn't necessarily mean you should. How does the user dependent on voice technology cope with frames or web pages that have no text alternatives to graphics? Do pages lose their meaning when their resolution is greatly increased for large print users? A designer should ask him- or herself if a colour-blind person could make sense of the screen. Is there sufficient contrast between colours? Windows 2000 has a button for the disabled to increase screen resolution, but how many of us are likely to press a button marked 'disabled' even though we would benefit from a larger font size ? especially in our later years?

Two issues have particularly stuck in my mind: very few people are totally blind and there are a wide range of possible visual problems ? people may have more than one of these ? and, most importantly, good design for the visually impaired means good design for all users ? everyone will benefit from well-designed pages.

Barbara Buckley is Research Programme Manager at the Library and Information Commission