You can discern patterns in the editorial content of IT Week if you read it long enough. We follow the news, of course, which in turn is usually created by the tech vendors, the government, and occasionally the great and good who read these pages, but the trends only have a limited shelf life. There's only so long you can write about the IT skills crisis, phishing, compliance and Vista.

Web site accessibility is another of those stories that never go away, because, to be honest, firms are still largely neglecting it. I vaguely remember writing a comment piece about it many months ago, and since then accessibility specialist Nomensa has released the findings of numerous sector-specific surveys on the subject.

Unsurprisingly, nearly all failed miserably to provide even the basic accessibility requirements of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), whose international standards have even been dismissed by some experts as not rigorous enough.

Then there is the law; there's always the law. The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) makes it a legal requirement for firms to make "reasonable adjustments " to their web sites to ensure that all members of society can use them. The problem is the word reasonable – I mean, if I were Jade Goody, my idea of what might be reasonable to say to a housemate is probably a lot different from, well, most of the rest of humanity.

The reason no online retailer has ever been brought to book for blatantly flouting the law is simple: money. In most cases, any legal action taken by a disabled user against a large online merchant ends up in an out of court pay-off, and until the government puts its money where its mouth is and throws the book at some high profile firm, that's the way it'll stay.

Aside from this the market really should have decided by now. According to the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), around 20 percent of the UK population have "communication difficulties, disabilities and differences" that prevent them from accessing the web. This translates into a potential four billion pounds up for grabs for businesses that see the light. And there's even a best practices guide to improving online accessibility – PAS 78.

In an effort to tackle the problem, the IMRG has teamed up the Hidden Differences Group to launch a new hosted toolbar that firms can put on their sites to aid DDA compliance, and hopefully encourage more visitors. The tool features a screen magnifier, functionality to change the background colour of a site to make it easier to read, and capabilities to save text as speech in MP3 format for later listening.

All of this is good news for firms wishing to make their sites more user-friendly, of course. The toolbar is relatively quick, cheap and painless to install, unless the retailer plumps for lots of customisation, which some of the big stores may do. But as some accessibility experts have commented, this is not a quick fix that will make a web site automatically DDA compliant and usable by all. The problem is, many firms might see it as just that.