To allow him to concentrate on his role as chairman of the Institute for Design and Disability, a body that fights for the inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of "normal" life, Cearbhall O'Meara has received a two-year secondment from his job as an assistive-technology consultant with Bank of Ireland.
Among the tasks facing O'Meara was building the organisation's website, which took 10 days. But he has never seen it, because he is blind.
O'Meara was diagnosed at the age of four with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye condition that affects the photosensitive cells in the retina that perceive light and colour.
When he was 24, O'Meara developed blind spots. Ten years later, as they worsened, he registered as blind. "I got the white stick. Because my grandfather had been blind, I knew how to use it. I remember walking by Trinity at lunchtime and partially seeing this long opening in the crowd. I kept my eyes down in case anyone would notice I still had partial sight.
Soon after, O'Meara was dismissed from his job as an English teacher in a Dublin language school. Undeterred, he combined a long love affair with the Flamenco guitar with the need to earn a living, and began teaching music. His faltering sight was not an obstacle.
O'Meara also started to use computers. Teaching himself, he wrote a music programme with more than 3,000 lines of code, which led him to apply for a programmer's job at Bank of Ireland.
Before starting his new job, O'Meara was trained in touchtyping, Braille and Cobal programming, but became frustrated with the limited expectations of disabled people.
In 1985, O'Meara returned to take up his position at the bank. He remembers the year for another reason; it was the last time he saw a face. He had to teach himself again, as no instruction videos were available from any of the mainframe manufacturers.
To meet the needs of blind programmers, O'Meara joined two other visually impaired people working in the sector and established the Visually Impaired Computer Society - www.iol.ie/vics - in 1986.
VICS works with employers and software developers to ensure blind and visually impaired people are given access to electronic data. It is affiliated with the Irish Computer Society and produces a tape-based magazine for computer users with visual disabilities.
VICS faced an obstacle with the impending arrival of Windows 95. Initially, the software was inaccessible to the visually impaired. "The VICS members were mad," says O'Meara. "We were working in computers and companies were going to go over to Windows and we would be totally excluded.".
ALONE among European countries, the Irish group protested. It joined a US movement to fight the inaccessibility of the new software. Crucially, the opposition included a rumour - allegedly started by the governor of Massachusetts - that the US defence forces would not buy Microsoft's product if it were not accessible to the blind.
As a result, Microsoft promised to make Windows 95 accessible when it was launched; the first fruit of the promise came in 1997, when visually impaired people received access to the more important functions of the operating system.
The society's members now test programs and screen readers for software companies and are at the heart of product development for disabled people.
Hard on the heels of this victory, the wider use of graphics on the Internet created further problems. "It became totally inaccessible, because screen readers cannot cope with icons or graphics," says O'Meara.
Certain browsers allow visually impaired users to identify text behind images on Web pages, but access to information on the Internet is still restricted.
In response, the Web Accessibility Initiative - www.w3.org/WAI - published guidelines for producing special Web pages, to show how web-based content can be more accessible.
O'Meara joined the Institute for Design and Disability - www.idd.ie - as his frustration increased at the exclusion that disabled people experience. The foundation contributes to the participation of disabled people through design with the motto: "Good design enables, bad design disables".
Joining the institute allowed O'Meara to use his training as an architect with a concern for how design interacts with disabled people.
He built its website using Microsoft's FrontPage. "I deliberately set out to see if I could write a website without using HTML," he says.
He hit a problem, though. The pages needed to be organised into a hierarchical structure, an impossible task for a sightless person. So O'Meara spent a week searching the navigational structure before discovering a simple text file without any formatting code.
"This file had obvious navigational markings, like `level one', `level two', so I was able to arrange the pages."
In his home-based office, O'Meara uses a standard Windows 98 computer with a Jaws screen reader. The software has been tested by the VICS expert group that worked on the development of Jaws.
Instead of a conventional mouse, O'Meara uses a keyboard-based one that jumps to the nearest icon rather than remaining over blank screen.
A central goal of the Institute for Design and Disability is to get every local authority in the Republic to adopt the Barcelona Declaration. Signed in 1995, it seeks better awareness of disabled persons and enshrines their right to services and a built environment sensitive to disabilities.
In February Mary Wallace, Minster of State at the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, announced the Government would invest £100,000 over the next three years to implement the declaration.
Last October, O'Meara was among the eight candidates shortlisted by the Whitaker Commission for part-time membership of the Human Rights Commission. Although John O'Donoghue, the Minister for Justice, did not make O'Meara one of his six appointees to the commission, he did appoint him to the Equality Authority in February.
O'Meara is optimistic that access for disabled people will grow through new technologies and improved design. "Even though accessibility remains low, there is a social attitude which is looking to achieve inclusion for the disabled," he says.
John Penton will deliver Designing for Disability, the 10th-anniversary lecture of the Institute for Design and Disability, at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin, on Wednesday at 8 p.m.