current accounts with online banking and NO TIMEOUT?

Partly because I don't see why she should have to disclose her personal security information to me, anymore than I would want to have to do to her.

I explained that it's partially due to her dyslexia and that I though they were, in effect, discriminating against her and others with that disability by requiring their users to be quick at typing - what about severely disabled people who have to type with mouth-operated pointers and such like? They were quite sniffy about how I was the only person who'd ever brought it up and they couldn't go around implementing every suggestion made by every customer (or in this case: non-, and not-to-be-, customer).

And that's the other reason I didn't want to apply for my SO: because I don't want to deal with an outfit that discriminates against her and doesn't (judging by the phone droid's attitude) give a toss about it.

Good, with money, my arse :-<

In theory they can't be read by anyone other than the site that put them there. There have been bugs which allowed them to be read by other sites.

I can understand your dissatisfaction with their response. However, for anyone forced to use this type of system, there is a "work around" that will keep you from being logged out:

Right click on a link on the site and select "open in new window" (or tab etc). Now follow your form link as normal and start filling, from time to time hit refresh on the other window to keep the session alive.

That sounds like a clear breach of the Disability Discrimination Act, so you should complain.

So is not hiring blind people for airlinee pilots. I should complain about that as well.

Oh and legless people as construction workers.

And illiterates to read editorial copy.

Get real.

I couldn't get a job as a super model either. Apparently my t*ts aren't big enough and my balls would spoil the thong appearance.

This world is full of unfair discrimination.

I just use a single session in Opera, need to have cookies on, then when finished Sign Off, click on a toolbar button that runs Delete Private Data and all history, cookies, cache etc. are cleared and the browser closed. I might be paranoid - I'm the only user of this computer.

Airlines are required to take reasonable steps to ensure that blind people can travel on their planes.

Similarly, companies are required to take reasonable steps to ensure that disabled people can use their websites. The World Wide Web Consortium publishes guidelines about how you should do this which you can find at

Unfortunately Barclays have by far the worst call centre staff of any bank I've phoned.

A good point, wasn't it only the other day that HSBC lost a court case because they had not made a branch accessable for wheelchair access.

Its about time that London Underground got the same treatment as only new lines are fullyaccessable and less than 1 in 10 of the older stations with lifts.Even some of those still have short stairs as well which makes them totally useless to a class of disabled persons.

Simon

Thanks. I've written to both smile and the co-op with the following message:

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

Your web site appears to discriminate against users with disabilities in that it does not comply with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

In message , at

True enough. I've seen MSN Messenger installed for All Users and then set to automatic login. *That* was a work placement bod who, needless to say, did not get the IT job he was after.

Saw an open bank account once. Walked into a hotel lounge and spotted an unattended laptop that was logged into HSBC BIB and on the CHAPS payment page. Oops.

The ironic thing in this case is that the banks are quite happy to have people using their systems from Windows machines, many of which are undoubtedly crawling with malware (not counting Windows itself ;-) and for all that the banks' T&Cs pages blather on about how you should be running antivirus s/w and so on) but here, at home, we're on a Debian Linux system, patched up to date, behind a (NAT) firewall, with separate user accounts set to lock (with password to unlock) after a few minutes' inactivity.

In message , Simon wrote

Winning a court case doesn't necessarily mean that the work will be done. It may be more cost effective to close down the branch to all customers.

Too right, even if the branch has no disabled customers.

Could've nicked the laptop ;-)

And it is only fairly recently that most banks' websites started working in anything other than Internet Explorer for Windows.

That might in general be so, I don't know, but I have always used Firefox (and previously, Mozilla) for the ones I use - HSBC and Alliance & Leicester. It was a matter of principle to not use IE.

It's a matter of necessity, not principle here. I'm running Linux and I've never seen any version of IE that worked on any flavour of Unix (although when I was a software test engineer (in a previous life) there was one that was supposed to - but (surprise, surprise from Microsoft) it didn't).

I thought that there were a number ways of running IE under WINE on Linux?

(In fact I think MS used to actually do a version for Solaris and HP-UX at one point)