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I have a vested interest in web accessibility. At just 19, I received the news that I probably had multiple sclerosis, that oft-misunderstood condition of the central nervous system that has no known cause or cure.

I know what it's like to experience sight problems, difficulty concentrating, extreme fatigue and the many other gifts multiple sclerosis (MS) has bestowed upon me in the 20 years since my diagnosis.

However, I'm not so different to everyone else. Not only do a great number of medical conditions result in loss of sight, reduced manual dexterity, etc. it's a simple reality that the ageing process will gift to us all some reduction in our sensory capabilities eventually.

I intend to keep enjoying music, shopping and socialising with my friends and family until I breathe my final breath. However, we'll only be able to do that if the web is able to bend and flex to meet the requirements of our ageing bodies.

A decade ago, I was involved in a campaign run by the Royal National Institute of Blind people (RNIB) to make web designers, British businesses and government agencies aware of the needs of disabled web users. The campaign publicised the fact that with more than 10 million disabled people in the UK, the 'disabled pound' is estimated to be worth in excess of £80bn each year.

I wish I could report that our extensive campaigning effort, the huge carrot of £80bn and the enormous stick of litigation has had the desired effect. However, in 2010 access to the web for disabled people is still patchy.

On 7 December 2010, BSI Standards published a new British Standard (BS 7888) that clearly describes precisely what the owners of British businesses must do to ensure they meet the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act when it comes to the design of their websites.

A British Standard isn't a law in itself, but it can provide guidance to a judge in a court of law should a disabled person wish to take a company to court under the Equality Act 2010 for failure to provide an accessible service. In the UK, BS 8878 is the best guide available to businesses wishing to ensure their websites are fully accessible to disabled people. It doesn't replace any guidance already published by software manufacturers or the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It simply pulls together all the relevant guidance into one publication, so that anyone wishing to make their website accessible to disabled people can discover all they need to know in a single document.

Meanwhile, Citizens Online has launched a new initiative, 'Fix the Web', which encourages ordinary people like you and I to report to them any website we find difficult to use. They promise one of their volunteers will contact the people behind the offending website and get them to sort it out.

There are estimated to be in excess of 80 million websites online today. That's a lot of websites to fix and a lot of website owners to contact. It's a laudable aim and an interesting approach, and I take my hat off to Citizens Online for giving this initiative a go. If nothing else, it will once again raise awareness of the critical importance of web accessibility.

However, if my decade of experience of lobbying the government, businesses and the web design industry has taught me anything: it's this. If you really want to make a lasting difference to the way technologies are designed then you need to exert your influence at the standards level.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

The majority of people I talk to agree that disabled people should be able to use the web. However, many websites continue to be inaccessible. Is this a deliberate action on the part of businesses and web developers to lock disabled people out of the web?

I don't think so.Ìý

I think the greatest enemy of web accessibility is the same old adversary that disabled people have been trying to conquer for centuries: ignorance.

It strikes me that people build inaccessible websites because it is possible to do so. So the solution must surely be to make it impossible to do so by ensuring that all of the web design tools that web designers use to build websites create accessible websites by default.

It is truly my belief that this is the only way to make the situation better. Legislation hasn't worked. Education hasn't worked. Even the business imperative hasn't worked.

I believe anything that makes more people aware of how disabled people experience life is a good thing. However, real change in disabled people's virtual lives will only come about by attacking the root cause of the discrimination through the application of standards.

Julie Howell established the world's first online community for people with MS. Since then, Julie has written the first British Standard on web accessibility and has led national campaigns to make the web more accessible to disabled people.