Andy Minnion, Rix Centre Director

My name is Andy Minnion and I’m the director of the Rix Centre, which is a centre for researching and developing multimedia for the benefit of people with learning disabilities. We’re also aware that out in the web developer community there are some guidelines and standards about how you should make a website accessible, so that people who have disabilities can use them and can understand them. But some of the things that we’ve tried have broken some of those rules, if you like. We’ve tried different ways of making things accessible, because sometimes the rules are a bit fixed, we’ve found that they don’t necessarily work best for people with a learning disability. At the heart of our approach, we’ve always involved people with learning disabilities as part of the team. So they have worked alongside our developers and have given us their views and opinions about whether we’re getting it right or not, and that’s been really useful. Another approach we’ve taken is to involve people with learning disabilities making their own websites.