THE wonders of the internet are being opened up to visually impaired people.

Bury's library service played its role in staging a "Seeing the Sites?" seminar on Wednesday, March 10 at the town hall's Elizabethan Suite.

The event, with ISaware and the Royal National Institute for the Blind, was to have been held last month but was put back to cater for demand across Greater Manchester.

Coun Siobhan Costello, cultural services spokesman, said the one-day seminar was aimed at managers, web designers and those planning their web sites. We want to address issues such as what the Internet has to offer people with sight loss, explain how blind and partially sighted people use the Internet and what those who commission and design web sites can do to help individuals with serious sight problems surf the net more easily," she said.

"The Disability Discrimination Act 1998 requires organisations to make their services equally available to disabled people.

"There are 120,000 visually impaired people in the North West alone and if they can't use a web site, that is a major loss of a potential audience to commercial organisations."

Coun Costello added: "With modern software, including things like speech synthesis, many blind people can and do use the Internet.

"We hope our course will provide a clear indication of the issues together with a few simple guidelines and tips which can turn a web site from a blind person's nightmare into a delight."

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