I am a disabled oldie who is now unable to tolerate certain sorts of screen movement, flashing lights, etc. My BT Yahoo! mailbox has an advert for an (otherwise admirable) cancer charity which persistently flashes down to obscure my emails. Is there any way of cutting this stuff out? Theresa Levell Clarke
There are two simple solutions to this. First, you could switch to the Firefox 2 browser and install AdBlock Plus (adblockplus.org/en/installation) extension, which will cut out the ads. Second, you could switch to Gmail, which doesn't have flashing adverts and also works well with Internet Explorer. I'd suggest you do both.
Backchat: Richard Morton, a web accessibility specialist, says: "Contact Yahoo and ask them to remove flickering images from their web pages. Remind them that it is their duty under the Disability Discrimination Act to make reasonable adjustments for people with disabilities."
They may well not want to stop running this type of advert but a perfectly reasonable adjustment would be to switch to text or non-flickering adverts for users based on their preferences. Online email systems generally have options for things like number of messages appearing on a page so this wouldn't be difficult. If they still won't make changes then it could be seen by a court as discrimination, especially given the size of the organisation.
David Stallard says: "Had you considered recommending IE7Pro for use with Internet Explorer 7? This is a free add-on which works in a similar way to Adblock Plus, and includes a number of useful features like mouse gestures, spell checker and many more." I didn't mention IE7Pro because I didn't know about it, but I'm testing it now.
