Not so long ago, Eleanor Rudge and I headed up to the British Museum for a conference on 'Designing for disability', organised by the Museums Association.

The aim of the day's talks was to emphasise the need for 'cultural equality for disabled people'. The drive for this equality, according to keynote speaker and host Marcus Weisen of the Jodi Awards (which awards excellence in accessible cultural websites and digital media), has been stagnating for some time. On a national level, little has happened since the important Attenborough Report of 1985, which was commissioned to provide a detailed picture of the extent to which disabled people could participate in the arts and culture. Although the UK has more recently been signatory to international policies on disability, it lacks the means of monitoring and assessing whether the advocated improvements are being effectively, and broadly, implemented.

Despite this, many cultural organisations do take accessibility issues very seriously, as does Cogapp in our work in the cultural sector and beyond. The conference covered some highly varied, but consistently impressive, approaches to closing the cultural equality gap for disabled people. Highlights of the day include:

Andrew Minnion from The Rix Centre. He leads a programme of research and development in the use of new media for people with learning disabilities. Their work is fascinating: attempting to harness the potential of the technologies most of us casually use everyday to help people with learning disabilities to compensate for their memory, communication and social interaction problems.

Linda Ellis from Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service. She is the web manager for WAMS, and has strived to make their website as accessible and useable as possible. Her talk focused on how she improved access for deaf visitors on the website, and the extensive efforts undertaken to enhance the experience of deaf visitors at Bantock House with portable British Sign Language (BSL) video guides.

Mark Nelson, director of Remark! in London, gave a particularly interesting talk. Mark, who was born deaf, gave his hugely energetic lecture in BSL with a translator. The talk focussed on his company's work providing BSL overlays for video, amongst other accessibility services. The Q&A session that followed raised some fascinating issues, including modern approaches to keeping websites with user-generated content accessible, and the problems of automating BSL translation with a computer-generated avatar (unfortunately literal translation tends to fail due to the difference in BSL sentence construction, and the language's lack of metaphor).

It was also great to hear about the work the National Archives have been doing in making their Learning Curve resources accessible. The example described, Prisoner 4099 (about a young prisoner in the 19th Century), was a play created in partnership with students, teachers and youth workers from the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB).