Vision Australia and My Health Record

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (10:09:22) — I was very pleased to meet with Vision Australia the other day to celebrate the work that we have done in securing electronic voting for the visually impaired in this state. But they also highlighted the need for a lot more to be done for the visually impaired and those with disabilities. One of the remarkable things they brought to my attention was that the My Health Record website is not disability accessible. It is a website run by a health department which is not accessible to people with disabilities — just remarkable!

In fact they demonstrated 12 ways in how it did not work. But they also went on to say that this is not uncommon and that they see this on a very regular basis. I would like to have been assured that this was not the case in Victoria and that all of our government sites were disability accessible, but they could not give me that assurance. I would hope that we are able to fix that, but we should not be fixing these things retrospectively. We should be always doing this when we plan. I think we see this with disability access for our trams and for aged-care strategies out in our communities. We need to be planning better for our future. We need to be planning better for the diversity of our community — for an ageing community, for a community with growing levels of disability. I hope that we do not see something like the My Health Record website not being accessible in this state.