[thelist] acces-board.gov - is this a joke?

Boris Mann boris at bmannconsulting.com
Sat Mar 22 11:00:29 CST 2003


> Peter-Paul Koch wrote:
>
> I'm currently working on a page about JavaScript
> and accessibility (will notify the list when it's ready), and
> visited http://www.access-board.gov/, which at first sight
> appears to be the site of the US board concerned with accessibility
> issues. What do we see on the homepage? A bloody JAVA
> APPLET which contains the main navigation, and no trace of an
> alternative navigation.

It is a bit of a joke. The site is currently on IIS using FrontPage  
extensions, with those god-awful Java applet hover buttons. These are  
pretty much a maintenance nightmare, as it is hard to check links, and  
if you want to change links, you have to change them everywhere.

We recently re-did a site that had originally been done with frames and  
FrontPage Java applet hover buttons using nothing but CSS and valid  
XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The site looks and functions better afterwards,  
is more accessible, *and* is easier to maintain.

No doctype, so set it to HTML4.01, and it still fails miserably:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.access- 
board.gov%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transi 
tional

Never mind that there aren't Dublin Core meta-tags used.

Couldn't find a contact/feedback page. Perhaps we can start bombarding  
them with proposals to re-vamp their website?

--
Boris Mann
http://www.bmannconsulting.com



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