A blind member of a Dublin City Council committee encounters a string of obstacles

One of the first items at last Wednesday’s meeting of Dublin City Council’s transport committee meeting was an apology to Robbie Sinnott. 

Sinnott, who is not a councillor, but is a member of the council committee, is blind. 

He’s the founder of Voice of Vision Impairment (VVI), and is on the committee via the Public Participation Network. 

The last meeting of that committee had been – as is common these days – a hybrid one, with some members in the council chamber, and some joining via video link. 

At that meeting on 3 September, Sinnott had tried to join via video link but hadn’t been able to get in due to an accessibility issue, said the committee’s chair, Green Party Councillor Janet Horner. 

Sinnott is not new to the council. He was a member of its planning committee during the last five-year council term, and then was selected, after the June 2024 general election, to join the transport committee.

In those roles, he’s worked on the issues at hand, but also pushed to defend his rights. 

His organisation, VVI, “exists to campaign for the needs and rights of people with disabilities, with a particular expertise in the perspective of those who are blind and partially sighted”, according to its website.

Blocked from attending

Last Wednesday, Horner introduced Brian Curtis, executive manager of the council’s Information Systems (IS) department, to explain what had happened that had blocked Sinnott from attending the previous meeting. 

“First of all I’d like to start by apologising to Dr Sinnott for the issues that arose, in terms of joining the last meeting,” Curtis said. 

During a regular security review “of our Office 365 environment”, amongst the recommendations was a setting not to allow anonymous people to connect to council meetings, he said. To stop bots or whoever joining and disrupting them, he said. 

They decided that was too strict, though, “so we actually allowed people, anonymous people, connect through a thing called captcha which is a way of showing that you’re a human person rather than a bot”. 

But the captcha they used “caused difficulties in terms of the sound volume in particular on the call to an iPhone, it was very hard to hear”, Curtis said. 

Sinnott, though a member of the committee – technically called the Mobility and Public Realm Strategic Policy Committee – wasn’t able to get through it to attend the meeting. 

The IS department has now removed the captcha, Curtis said, and doesn’t plan to bring it back, so the problem should be solved. 

Sinnott thanked Curtis, but said that “Captchas are notoriously inaccessible for visually impaired people and if there was even a modicum of disability-proofing done on this, that would have come to the fore.” 

The incident highlights the need for the council to consult with disabled persons’ organisations (DPOs) like VVI, Sinnott said. Otherwise “inadvertent discrimination will happen and people will be shut out”. 

Accessing committee documents

Is there anything Sinnott would have wanted to say at the previous meeting, if he’d been able to get in? asked Horner, the committee chair.

Yes, Sinnott said. “At the last meeting, I would have drawn attention to the fact that the Active Travel Document on the C2CC that was sent to everybody a day in advance, there was no accessible – there was no screen-reader accessible version of that sent,” he said.

He was referring to a report from the council’s Active Travel Programme Office on usage of the Clontarf to City Centre cycling and walking route. A screen reader is a computer programme that reads text out loud.

“The principle is we’re all equal, committee members, and it should not be happening in this day and age that documents are fit for some people and not fit for others on the committee,” he said.

Later, as Horner moved through the agenda of last Wednesday’s meeting of the transport committee, she introduced a presentation from Caoimhe Clarke, on a report titled “Active Travel: The Magic Pill”, from the Climate and Health Alliance.

The Climate and Health Alliance includes more than 30 organisations, such as Trinity College Dublin, the Asthma Society, the Irish Cycling Campaign, the Royal College of Surgeons, and Irish Doctors for the Environment.

Clarke, who is a doctor, and a member of the council’s transport committee, is on the “working group” for the alliance, she said. 

After Horner introduced the presentation, Sinnott signaled that he had a “point of order” to raise before it went ahead. 

“I would suggest that this be deferred until an accessible version of the document is made available,” he said. 

He’d received “something Monday night, but it’s got no pages, it’s got no section numbers, so it’s not referencable, it’s like a jumble if one’s listening to it on a screen reader”, he said. 

Horner, the chair, though, said she wanted to move ahead with the presentation anyway.

“I will just say in this case the Climate and Health Alliance is predominantly a voluntary alliance and while I would expect that standard from our public bodies here, I don’t want to, I guess, cause an issue or detract from the work and the value of the work that has been proposed and the presentation that is in front of us today,” she said. 

“So I know that Dr Clarke has promised to deliver an accessible version of it, or an improved version of it, as soon as possible to you but I would like to proceed and make sure we can hear the presentation today in its full form,” she said. 

Independent Councillor Mannix Flynn chimed in at this point. “With all due respect chairperson, this is Dublin City Council and I think we need to set an example, I don’t think there’s a big issue in deferring it to the next meeting if the presenter would agree.”

Horner said that, whatever about the full report, the presentation on the agenda for discussion at the meeting was accessible.

“I am aware the presentation has been provided in accessible form, which is all we are discussing today. It is the full report which is not in accessible form,” she said. “I am going to ask Dr Clarke to proceed.”

When Clarke had the floor, she began with an apology to Sinnott. “I do apologise that we are slow, we are a volunteer organisation,” she said.  

The chair of the Climate and Health Alliance, Sean Owens “has, now, an acquired brain injury because he was hit by a car in January”, Clarke said.

“I know that’s not an excuse, but I suppose just to put it in context there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes when we all have full time jobs and with our chair in hospital for many months,” she said. “We will get that report to you in an appropriate accessible format. 

The paper argues that active travel is a public health intervention, and “movement is medicine”, Clarke said.

She proceeded with her presentation, and a discussion followed, with several councillors offering supportive comments.

Processes

Sinnott said on Tuesday by email that when he was on the planning committee during the last council term, “there were difficulties with DCC's own documentation in the beginning, but I worked something out with the Secretary, who made sure everything was accessible by letting DCC Departments know etc”.

The secretary of the transport committee, which he is on now, “is absolutely fantastic, and she is even more on her game than my last experience, e.g., letting Departments know when documents are not screenreader-accessible”. 

But still some documents come to the committee that are not accessible, Sinnott says. 

The council has not responded to queries sent Monday on who is responsible for making sure all the reports for each meeting are accessible to all. 

Or whether the council has guidelines it issues to individuals presenting at meetings, on how to prepare reports and presentations for the occasion so that they will be.