Relaunched Recovery.gov Fails Accessibility Standards 197
SethGrimes writes with this excerpt from Information Week's Intelligent Enterprise: "Recovery.gov, a showcase government-transparency Web site that relaunched on Monday, fails to meet US federal government Section 508 accessibility standards and accessibility best practices. The non-compliance issues relate to display of data tables — an essential point given the site's promise of 'Data, Data & More Data' — despite on-site compliance claims. Other elements including navigation maps, while compliant, are poorly designed. Sharron Rush, co-founder and executive director of accessibility-advocacy organization Knowbility, goes so far as to state, 'The recovery.gov Web site is a good example of what NOT to do for accessibility in my opinion.' Louise Radnofsky explains in the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire blog, 'Expectations are high for the site, not least because of its hefty price tag: Smartronix, a Maryland contractor, is being paid $9.5 million for its initial overhaul and is likely to get another $8.5 million to keep the site running through 2014.' Compliance with Section 508 of the federal Rehabilitation Act — a baseline expectation — is a long-standing federal-government requirement for information-systems accessibility to persons with disabilities. The site's accessibility failures — which are shared by another showcase government-transparency site, USAspending.gov — are nonetheless easily seen."
$9.5 million? (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, for $9.5 million dollars I think they can afford to hire a web designer that knows how to make a website accessible. I mean, I made a website that was accessible for two cans of mountain dew and what was left of a can of pringles. Looked better too. Then again, I did it for this girl who I really hoped would notice me after (she didn't), so I might have underbid just a bit. Still -- I think I would do better than these guys did. :\
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9.5 mil for re-designing a website seems suspiciously high, even for a federal contract. Does the contract include other services that aren't mentioned in the summary?
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Hookers and Blackjack?
For that much money, I would expect Hookers and Blackjack. Nothing less.
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Then again, I did it for this girl who I really hoped would notice me after (she didn't):\
You *do* realize she was blind, right?
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And probably hetero as well. A gay guy hit on me [slashdot.org] a couple of weeks ago in a redneck bar, and I was there with a woman! What is it about gays and lesbians that make them think everyone is gay?
Wrong line of work! (Score:5, Interesting)
If the Feds paid nearly 10 million bucks for that I am obviously in the wrong line of work. It looks like something I could knock off in a few weeks with Django and MySQL.
The site does very little if you don't have Flash, BTW. Many pages don't even give you a "You don't have Flash" message. You just get blank white pages. I make a point of not having Flash on my main Linux box, just to see how this tool of the devil is poisoning the net.
...laura
Re:Wrong line of work! (Score:5, Insightful)
If the Feds paid nearly 10 million bucks for that I am obviously in the wrong line of work. It looks like something I could knock off in a few weeks with Django and MySQL.
The site does very little if you don't have Flash, BTW. Many pages don't even give you a "You don't have Flash" message. You just get blank white pages. I make a point of not having Flash on my main Linux box, just to see how this tool of the devil is poisoning the net.
...laura
While I will agree with you that 1) many sites can be built more user friendly with less work using the right tools and 2) Flash is evil, you must remember they need to interface with a bunch of legacy government servers to get the data. That's a royal pain in itself.
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Mod parent up. This isn't your everyday database problem.
It's your everyday data warehousing problem, writ large.
The solution is probably to institute a warehouse of warehouses, organized logically such that it consolidates like databases.
This would be costly and outside the scope of this particular project, but of nearly incalculable value. (And in any case, the value is probably impossible to calculate without performing this exercise!)
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> If the Feds paid nearly 10 million bucks for that I am obviously in the wrong
> line of work. It looks like something I could knock off in a few weeks with
> Django and MySQL.
Yes, but it would have take several months and several hundred thousand dollars for specialized lawyers to put together a qualified bid for the job. Much of the work involved in bidding on and completing a Federal contract has to do with complying with loony procurement regulations rather than performing any actual productive
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> If Government contracting has so little profit, then why are so many
> companies scrambling to do it?
It has about the same profit as the alternatives or no one would bid on the jobs. They just figure the extra costs into their bid (they must employ experts to do that figuring) and so the government pays more for the same thing as would anyone else. Of course, there are many companies that won't bid on government jobs not because they are not qualified to supply the goods and/or services but because
How to do it. (Score:5, Interesting)
If the Feds paid nearly 10 million bucks for that I am obviously in the wrong line of work. It looks like something I could knock off in a few weeks with Django and MySQL.
First start a company. Then make campaign contributions to the incumbent politicians that are part of the committee that overseas these things. Start in the Senate. Of course, you'll have to get around the campaign finance laws, but don't worry, there are plenty of law firms that can help - for a very nice price.
That' s not enough though! You also need a lobbying firm to lobby other politicians and the Government offices that also have input - there are folks that will do that for a nice price too.
Now, there will be others who will do the same, so you'll have to be very strategic and get the best advisers.
Now, after winning the contract, just outsource the actual design and implementation to the lowest bidder, and keep the profits; which in this case $10 million minus $5-6 million in campaign contributions and lobbyists less $200,000 (let's be generous!) for the actual software development, leaves you a profit of $3.8 million to $4.8 million.
Of course, you may have to go overseas because, as every CIO says, there are no qualified American programmers and they have to go overseas for the talent! All those people that don't have jobs out in the market now aren't qualified - even though the companies that used to employ them found them to be qualified for years but had to let them go for cost cutting purposes. They're out of work so there must be something wrong with them!
But wait! There's more!
You won't book the $3.8 to $4.8 million! You'll have other expenses and things to pay, tax write-offs and whatnot that will leave you with a loss. Then of course, there's going to be tax credits that will enable you and your buddies to get more money out of the American Taxpayer.
That is how you make money with Government contracts.
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What are you talking about? Why would contractors do what government employees should be doing anyway?
Oh, what's that? 'Small government' and 'Free market' Republicans want this?
OK, then!
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I make a point of not having Flash on my main Linux box, just to see how this tool of the devil is poisoning the net.
Well, the harm is already done
I'd really like to use an alternative, but have been unable to find anything that include both a programming API and a good animation tool. JavaFX seems close to this, having vector and bitmap manipulation in its API, but I haven't seen any good animation tool yet.
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On my main FreeBSD/amd64 desktop box, I not only make the point of not having Flash on it, I don't even have the choice, as it is not supported by Adobe. So much for accessibility.
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Actually federal contractors are not paid that well and usually have minimum benefits, some are 1090 instead of W2 and have to save their own tax money to pay the IRS. The bulk of the money goes to the Federal Contractor company and their board of directors and upper management.
I used to be a federal contractor, but I always followed federal guidelines for disability accessibility, Y2K, network standards, security standards, etc. I wasn't paid much, and they promised me a raise, but I only got a fraction of
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and you're also wrong (Score:2)
Here you're wrong also. If you used those you would produce something better than current APSX+Flash+whatever. I guess. :)
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And still the incompetence is staggering...
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How very ironic... (Score:5, Insightful)
This stinks.
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That a website promoting our fiscal recovery cost so much. As an American citizen and a professional web developer, I'd like to understand how this amount can possibly be justified.
It's a commercial company hired by the government with, what seems, very little oversight - a recipe for disaster, as you have all the wonders of capitalist cost cutting, with no competition / market hand to keep that in check.
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If the site has to interface with older, obscure, and/or legacy databases in other government divisions in order to gather its data, then that will eat up a lot of time and money. I suspect that the front end was the cheapest part. It's the back end that probably had the I.T. guys pulling out their hair.
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I'm a web developer as well, but the kind of money being thrown around is not surprising. A lot of big government/commercial web projects cost that much. And you're right, obviously hardly any of it goes to the actual people doing the hard work.
Report 'em! (Score:2, Insightful)
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You are at this page because you loaded the JavaScript free version of reCAPTCHA, but it looks like you have JavaScript. We need to prevent this for security reasons. If you are testing out the JavaScript-free version, turn off JavaScript in your browser.
*sigh*
How to do 508 right - www.financialstability.gov (Score:2, Interesting)
Our company developer the Trouble Asset Relief Program's site, at http://www.financialstability.gov/
I am happy to report, MOSTLY compliant with Section 508.
And it has cool stuff, too.
Meh. (Score:4, Insightful)
private website: recovery.com (Score:4, Informative)
Here's an interesting note on NPR relating to a private company that is aggregating the same data.
http://recovery.com/ [recovery.com]
"When Congress approved the stimulus bill, it made a point of setting up a Web site called Recovery.gov to allow citizens to track all those billions in spending. But if you've gone looking for it, you might have stumbled across another, very similarly named site, Recovery.com.
The dot-com version is not run by the government, but it also tracks the stimulus -- and much of its information is more up to date. In fact, it has spending information that the government won't have until October, and its data provide a sneak peak into how the stimulus spending is going.
The site is run by Onvia, a Seattle company that collects and sells data on government procurement. Whatever the layer of government -- whether state, county, school district or local water board -- Onvia wants to know what's being purchased."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112893572&ps=cprs [npr.org]
Re:private website: recovery.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Quick comparison:
Recovery.gov
Recovery.com
While showing the data in page format is definitely more accessible from the POV of a screen reader, the graphical map is more useful in terms of finding out how money is being spent around where I live.
The recovery.gov website is actually pretty good, in under a minute I was finding how funds were being allocated in my neighborhood.
Looking at the contractor web site (Score:2)
Smartronix [smartronix.com] it looks like their own style of designing their corporate web site is not disability accessible.
They use Flash content pop-up Windows that a blind person cannot see, unlike an image tag that has Alt text or a hyperlink.
Obviously they used their own corporate web site standards than the federal government accessibility standards.
direct access (Score:2)
It'd be nice if the site would give direct access to the database, so people could mashup whatever they wanted. Anybody know what it runs on? SQL?
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It'd be nice if the site would give direct access to the database
It'd be nice if they provided a copy of the database. Direct access would probably set a world record for fastest denial-of-service in web history.
Accessability statement (Score:2, Informative)
From a technology point of view (Score:2)
From a technology point of view, the site was open source when it first launched in February or March 2009. It used Drupal [drupal.org] on Linux.
Now, it is using ASP.NET, presumably on Windows.
Not saying this made it less accessible. Far from it. But that there was also a switch from open source to proprietary as well.
Not a fan of this administration, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm actually glad for this website, as it just reaffirms my belief that this stimulus bill is a load of shit. Most of the recipients of grant money in my local area are accountants and attorneys, who are the ones driving around in Porches and Bimmers while not creating tons of jobs for local citizens. Hurray for progress.
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I'm actually glad for this website, as it just reaffirms my belief that this stimulus bill is a load of shit. Most of the recipients of grant money in my local area are accountants and attorneys, who are the ones driving around in Porches and Bimmers while not creating tons of jobs for local citizens.
Our of curiosity, where do you live?
In my immediate vicinity the stimulus has gone to:
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Florida, and here's a run down of just some of the money spent
-$80k in grants to one PA (doesn't specify what for, but it's a grant so no need to pay back)
-$70k in grants to a massage school
-$1.5mil to someone who is apparently clearing woods
-$450k to another PA (mostly in grants)
-$25k to an accounting firm
-$3 mil to a local university (which is in debt and cutting classes while paying the president a $5 mil salary)
-$200k to another local university that is actually not in debt
I could go on but I think the
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Which would never make it to the gas station attendant, but instead the oil companies coffers. I thought this was going to be the administration of no special interests?
(PS - Yeah I know you were just being funny)
It should have been simple (Score:3, Interesting)
If accessibility is a major concern, you have at least one blind person on your staff that must approve the layout. I worked with a blind DBA for a year and had the luxury of having him critique a website of mine for accessibility and implemented all his recommendations. The changes weren't all that difficult since I don't use evil crap like flash in the first place.
Question on Accessibility (Score:2, Interesting)
Pages have been designed to avoid a screen-flicker frequency greater than 2Hz and lower than 55 Hz.
So... what frequency does that leave? Could anyone tell me what I'm missing here?
I would think anything lower than 55Hz would also be lower than 2Hz, and anything greater than 2Hz would be greater than 55Hz, so.... I'm a little confused.
(And, yes, I did ask my friend Google, although if anyone could give me a gentle push toward a search term better than "Hertz", I'd be appreciative.)
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How the hell can a web page control screen flicker?
That's a uber deep setting buried in the X config or the device manager.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate
I don't know, but I am assuming they are avoiding 2 thru 55 HZ ,,, as to how it applies, I imagine it has to do with the frame rate of flash.
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact it is easier to make a site that blind people can use because the task mostly consists of leaving off superfluous crap.
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I make my Geocities-esque personal site more accessible to the blind by substituting looping midi renditions of Spice Girls tunes for tiled animated gif backgrounds.
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Exactly. I'm not blind, but I do prefer to browse with a larger-than-normal font. If sites just mark up content, then that works fine. Some pages override that control because they need to do complicated layout to say what they mean (like those interactive maps on recovery.gov), but most things that you need to say can be done with text.
I didn't think the Recovery.gov data was so bad (for my standards) once you clicked the "Text View of Data" button. Pull-down menus and standard HTML tables with hyperli
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Good point.
Also note that access to government sites isn't the only benefit that taxes pay for.
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's an incredibly ignorant response. Why should blind people have to settle for shitty data from a shitty website for which they are paying tax dollars?
The web is primarily a textual medium. That you have a browser that uses the markup to create a visual display doesn't make people who either don't have or cannot use such a browser any less important.
It's not like it's very difficult to make web pages accessible. There are well-defined mechanisms to include attributes for common tags so that alternative browsers, such as screen readers, can present the information in a way that the user can understand and navigate.
As a matter of fact, many traffic signals do have audio indicating when it is safe for a blind pedestrian to cross.
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I'm trying to figure how one would present tables of data, in a manner that IS blind person accessible. It just doesn't sounds like it would be possible. Sure most of the web is/can be textual, but, how do you provide large amounts of data in a 508 compliant way? This isn't like putting out a paragraph th
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:4, Informative)
On a typical reader, a 508 compliant table would sound something like this, with pauses indicated by commas, and long pauses by semicolons:
Table, Contributions by State; ;
State, New York;
Dollars, 56 million;
Contributors, 120; ;
State, Vermont;
Dollars, 32 million;
Contributors, 140; ;
State, Texas;
(etc.)
Is it usable by a blind person? Yes. Someday, if your eyesight fails you, you may need to get tabular information in exactly this way.
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A conversion that worked well for me when implementing an interface to a game that had many tables:
Visual representation:
item price
car $25,000
bike $500
Audible representation:
item car price 25 thousand dollars
item bike price 5 hundred dollars
In the particular game, the audio representation was often more concise even on screen, as there were often empty or zero-value columns that could simply be skipped.
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit. There is nothing inherently 'visual' about data. The function of the site is to make lists and numbers relevant to the operation of the government available to the public. All of the public. That task does not require the use of "Web 2.0" crap. If you think that the data can be better presented in the form of swarms of crawling colored beetles set up your own site, copy over the data (or just link to it) and have at it. It's all in the public domain.
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FWIW, I'm glad you're not a developer anymore, too!
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:5, Informative)
Which part of Hypertext Transfer Protocol are you having trouble with? Just because you spend most of your time online watching youtube videos and browsing the latest AJAX powered dynamic rollercoaster does not mean that the rest of the web, and especially the parts where real work is done, are "inherently visual". Far from it.
I'd like to take you to task on this, but Steve Krug [webreference.com] has put this far more succinctly that I ever could. Read that link to become educated about
1) Why accessibility is important
2) Why most (able bodied) developers don't care about it, and
3) Why this problem persists (We haven't automated accessibility.)
The most important point Krug makes is the real reason you should care about and implement accessibility in your websites. "It's the right thing to do."
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:5, Insightful)
> "It's the right thing to do."
If that is the best argument ya got it won't work in the real world. But there is a better one. A site designed to be accessable tends to be a good website, period.
Some of the reason is that accesssable sites must avoid the temptation to take the easy fix of throwing anything complicated into a flash applet or other inaccessable crap. But an equally important part is the opposite argument of one I make in another post about .aspx being the seal of crap. It isn't because the Microsoft stuff can't be made to work with enough effort, it is that only clueless people tend to pick it in the first place and clueless people will do other clueless things. Conversely, people cluefull enough to build a properly accessable site will also tend to make a generally well designed site. And host it on a better and less costly platform like a LAMP server.
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Just as an aside - .aspx tends to be crap because Microsoft's built-in objects and default settings are crap. It takes a *lot* of effort to replace default behaviour with something a normal person would expect.
In some cases, to make a minor adjustment you have to learn about ASP.NET pipeline, page rendering order, how output normally proceeds, and have to derive from an unrelated object usually in an unrelated file (app_code folder) and spread your code all over the site, just to do something you can achie
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:5, Insightful)
but, isn't it going a bit far on things that just are naturally aimed for normal people?
I happen to believe that this country's government should do everything possible to help those who want to contribute and be a part of society do so -- normality not withstanding. Most people don't make a choice to go deaf, blind, or become handicapped. It just happens (most of the time). I would feel a lot better going to bed each night if I knew that should such a calamity happen to me, my life wouldn't come to an end literally or figuratively. There's some things that are just humane to do. That's why the rules are there. No, they're not important for you but to someone else it might mean the world.
No, it's not going too far -- it's not going far enough. WHO estimated [afb.org] that in 2002 there were 161 million (about 2.6% of the world population) visually impaired people in the world, of whom 124 million (about 2%) had low vision and 37 million (about 0.6%) were blind. For comparative purposes, it's guessed [arstechnica.com] that Linux commands a 1.7% marketshare on the desktop. Which means, there's more people out there who are blind than use linux -- yet, were I to suggest that support for Linux not be included because it isn't something normal people use or care about, I'd be lynched.
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Even though the web may primarily be a visual medium, it can be navigated without relying only on eyes. People with more severe visual impairments regularly surf the web with text-to-speech software assisting them. Poor design, such as misusing tables in place of [div], [span] and other proper formatting makes things tough, as does the practice
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Color schemes that look fine to you or I can be a nightmare for someone with color blindness
More often than that, and affecting more people, are sites developed by clueless kids with low contrasting text (I'm looking at you, Boost Mobile) like gray on black, or blue on a different shade of blue. These work fine for young people, but most geezers have a hard time parsing them.
With Boost Mobile it's actually funny, as the phones themselves have an option to change the size of the text!
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Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:4, Informative)
I work for a nonprofit organization that receives grants from the federal government. Any web sites for the US-funded projects must be Section 508 compliant. That means:
It can be difficult.
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:4, Insightful)
So don't take any government money.
This is about a government web site specifically aimed at being accessible. So, no, the comments aren't going too far.
P.S.: It's not just a government web site, it's one that some people got paid a rather large amount to create, and expect to be paid another rather large lot to keep working.
My feeling is that the web site should be marked not satisfactory, and all payment withheld until they do it right.
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Dude, you simply have zero clue about what blind people are good at. I had lunch yesterday with a blind Ph.D. candidate who probably codes circles around you. Programming is one of the best occupations for the blind. There's JAWs in Windows that does the job beautifully, allowing bind programmers to read the screen at 850 words per minute, probably 3X your reading speed. There are blind and deaf programmers who use Braille displays to code like you wouldn't believe. JPEGs are inherently 'visual' medium
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What's funny is, I bet a non-handicapped person is really behind this. If I were planning on doing something with the data, and it were jailed in Flash instead of perfectly acceptable HTML, I'd use any applicable lawsuit to get access to the data. Not proud of that, just sayin'.
Besides, if a blind person saw the site, they wouldn't necessarily know which data is missing. They'd have to be at least partially "in cahoots" with a sighted person.
I blame sighted people for the whole mess.
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Do you are understand that web accessibility is really not hard?
Incorrect. The web is an information medium. As far as the computer goes, the display and keyboard are really kind of arbitrary, the compelling action takes place between those two!
So, do you think
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I mean, the web and computers are inherently 'visual' mediums.
The whole world is visual communications. The elevator buttons, the exit signs in buildings, walk lights on traffic signals, business signs... most elevator buttons are also marked in braille, but there's no braille for the rest of my tiny and greatly incomplete list.
But the internet isn't solely a visual medium. For instance, you can hear almost every radio station in the world on it. And text can be translated into speech trivially.
isn't it go
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God forbid that one of this days you have an accident and loose any of your senses, especially your sight. Only then you may appreciate why there's all this talk of putting beepers on pedestrian crossings, making websites accessible to screen readers, and hell, even putting car-tones on electric cars.
But what if he doesn't? (Score:2, Interesting)
What if, like the vast majority of people, he doesn't lose his sight or senses? If it is reasonable for people who are impared to wish the same impairment on others, is not reasonable to wish that impaired people did not exist?
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Available but not mandatory.. Hmm.. So the government should be able to choose communications media that is inaccessible to it's citizens and you are fine with that? How about if the government raise your taxes, published the notice in some magazine no one has ever heard of, and when you are expecting a huge return like last year and purchase that new big screen TV, you find out that you actually owe the government some money.
Here the problem. The government chooses to communicate with the citizens and trad
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Yes, but should we also ban manufacturing cars unless they can be safely driven by blind? That's what we are doing with websites right now - every page, no matter how obscure, must be accessible. Just like we might ask blind to take a bus or taxi, we could require providing data as either plain text or machine readable format so that some tools can be used to access it.
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I would surmise that bringing a complex website into compliance for the blind would constitute an "undue hardship".
Case in point: Youtube.
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Actually this is one case where search, audio and comments can be easily made accessible to the blind.
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God forbid that one of this days you have an accident and loose any of your senses, especially your sight. Only then you may appreciate why there's all this talk of putting beepers on pedestrian crossings, making websites accessible to screen readers, and hell, even putting car-tones on electric cars.
It's one thing to try to help the handicapped in society. It's another to define something as worthless just because it hasn't yet been adapted to some handicapped audiences. You see one is being just, and one is being a fucking dick. I'll leave it to you to solve the puzzle.
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God forbid that one of this days you have an accident and loose any of your senses
I loose my senses every day. But I'm glad I never lose any of them.
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Seriously, I'm on oxygen and walk with a cane. I'll never hike into the Grand Canyon again, and I just avoid some things like visiting hilly towns (S.F. or even Jerome, AZ.) I do like being able to get into buildings via a ramp as stairs kick my ass... but I don't think they should have one circling the Statue of Liberty just so I can go to the ver
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I spent a lot of effort and time setting up my reporting sites with JS and tables instead of flash for just this reason. Flash doesn't belong everywhere - and not everyone wants it turned on.
There is really no excuse for using it just to display charts.
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:5, Informative)
Flash does have accessibility capabilities in its API, it's just that people don't use it.
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IMO using Flash anywhere where it's not absolutely necessary is stupid. Actually using any tech that's not needed is stupid. If you can substitute your flash with a little standards-following javascript, use the javascript. If you can use plain HTML instead of javascript, use plain HTML.
There is no reason to get out a circular saw to cut a piece of 1 x 1/4 wood. A hand saw is the better tool for this. There is no reson to transport one person in an SUV, a sedan or coupe is a better tool for this.
It seems we
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If you read the article you would see that they are complaining about the text tables the site provides not being marked up properly, not the use of flash.
Re:Isn't this going a bit far? (Score:2)
I probably wouldn't be considered handicapped, but a few moments on the site made me think tl;dr. Fuck that state of the art web site shite. Fortunately most of the web pages I choose to peruse eschew Flash and other crap like that. My dad thinks the web is a waste of time because of that stuff, which won't render on his ancient browser anyway, for the most part. I am constantly trying to explain that there is good, useful information available but he tends to believe his own experience more than mine. I ne
Flash has accessibility mechanisms (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Okay (Score:4, Insightful)
No surprise at all. The right-wing anti-Obama crowd once again shows how petty they are... Poor accessibility on a web site? $10M for it? Well, here's an idea... we could give billions and billions to companies with strong ties to the Obama administration, and hide everything behind a vale of secrecy. It worked so well for the last administration.
I'm losing my central vision and ability to read, so accessibility is a hot-button topic for me. Gmail is terrible, and that effects me - Google should do something about it. Recovery.gov is far easier to navigate with a screen reader. The first item on their web site is a graphic which does nothing for the blind, but the first link [recovery.gov] under it is to a text version. It's not perfect, but at least average. Anyway, almost no sites pay attention to accessibility guidelines. It's up to programmers behind programs like JAWs to make them accessible anyway, and frankly, they do a pretty good job.
Recovery.org is a huge success. Even for the blind.
Re:Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
What's impressive to me is that we were even aware of the multi-million design bill.
Airing out your dirty garbage does stink up the place for awhile, but in the end it keeps things fresh.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that there is a bit of over-reaction here. But I think it's healthy. A political love-fest doesn't drive progress, only constructive criticism does. Troubled waters can't become stagnant.
So far, I've been pleasantly surprised with the site. Aesthetically speaking, it far exceeded any expectations I had for a government website. And even though there's way too much flash (you don't really need flash to generate pretty charts & graphs on a modern browser; Magento does a good job of it without any
Re:Okay (Score:4, Insightful)
However, this is something that should be brought up. It's great that Obama wants to modernize government IT use and communications, but this is different for the government than it is for the private sector. A company can decide they don't really need to go that extra mile to make their site perfect in terms of accessibility, they can be just barely on this side of the law and be fine. However, for the government, the site should be damn near perfect. It's the right of every citizen to be able to communicate effectively with their government. They serve all of us, so there isn't a "good enough" when it comes to access. Companies can choose customers, governments can't.
Re: (Score:2)
In a word: crap.
You know why the government has hardly any web presence? It's because the requirements you're talking about, the requirements 99% of the world just happily ignores, are so arduous, so much of a pain in the ass to implement, that they just don't bother to do anything at all.
I submit that the purpose of the regulations, while noble, needs to bow out long enough for the government to at least get started with the web.
Re: (Score:2)
Amen, brother. You touch on a core issue about government that can be extrapolated to government as a whole.
First, the PITA requirements; politically correct, mostly unnecessary and designed to please almost no one. Everything government does is subject to obtuse politics rather than practical considerations.
Second, cost is a core issue for any project yet in government we are often told that cost is irrelevant because the social cost of inaction is unacceptable. Social Security and Medicare are both fina
Re: (Score:2)
Two things:
1. He was talking about holding off, not eliminating the requirements.
2. We just had this conversation this morning, when someone said "Capitalism is the best system we have". But you have to ask, is it better to have a system that works to improve the social good of everyone. Or is it better to have a system where a few can get rich at the expense of the rest.
3. I disagree about being "Socially Good" is
Re: (Score:2)
One major thing is it isn't like they would have to maintain multiple sites. You would expect a $9.5 million site to have features that can be found in virtually any content management system (free or commercial). Such as the ability to have fancy and compliant versions of the site that are generated automatically.
Re: (Score:2)
not to be pedantic or anything
Re: (Score:2)
"Recovery.org is a huge success. "
In what alternate reality? Most people have never heard of it or use it. There have been plenty of well-made websites, but with sparse traffic. They're not a "success" then.
Re:Okay (Score:4, Interesting)
Does this really surprise anybody?
Actually yes, the level of "badness" is kind of staggering on this one. There are other "decent" federal and state websites (whitehouse.gov, ca.gov) so I expected that the code would be something that's at least comparable.
When I first read the article (shocking I know) I thought it was just someone trying to nitpick or that the editor is another Obama-troll, so midway through it I visited the site to view the source code myself and I almost threw up.
There are a bazillion (that's 2 LOC right?) JS and CSS includes, XML declaration tags in the middle of the page, tables for layout (top navigation), the works.
For fun, I disabled JavaScript and CSS, and the first few lines that someone without JS/CSS would see are truly amusing:
You are leaving the Recovery.gov Website
Click the link to access
exit
We hope your visit was informative and enjoyable.
Thursday, October 01, 2009
I'm actually surprised that the article left all these issues and picked tables and forms to discuss.