I had an unusual experience in the summer while visiting the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth. My wife had some problems walking long distances, and we both wanted to look round the aquarium, so we asked the reception on the off chance if they had a wheelchair we could borrow. They did, and next thing i knew, i was pushing my wife round to see lots of different fishes.

The experience made sense of some of the user accessibility issues we deal with day to day on the web and how important it is to get it right. If a visitor to a website can’t easily get to the content with or without a virtual wheelchair (aka screen reader), we’re not doing our jobs properly. If the buttons and links can’t be reached from the ‘wheelchair’, the visitor might miss important parts of the website.

We also visited the Lost Gardens of Heligan during the summer, and again borrowed a wheelchair to help with the amount of walking. Unlike the aquarium, there were parts of the garden we couldn’t access with the wheelchair. I suppose the Victorian designers had other things on their minds.