[WSIS CS-Plenary] UN Official Document System is online

[Vittorio Bertola]

Georg C. F. Greve ha scritto:
>  rp> Regards to all and Happy Transparent and Accessible New Year.
> 
> I just tried this and had problems actually getting to the documents,
> others have reported similar problems with non-IE browsers on Windows
> and Macintosh. It appears the site is running on Microsoft and is
> using Microsoft-only functions for Javascript.
> 
> Could someone else please confirm whether this effect also exists for
> them or whether this is some odd freak-incident that I have been
> seeing?

I decided to do some voluntary consultancy work for the United Nations and 
tested the site with some different browsers and operating systems 
(fortunately I had everything at hand). I went to the home page, clicked 
on "Welcome", then on the "Simple Search" button, tried a full text search 
for "internet governance", and then tried to browse the results.

Here's the outcome:

Internet Explorer 6/Windows 2000: OK
Firefox 1.0/Windows 2000: NO - you can perform a search and get to the 
results page, but when you click on the Javascript link to see a document 
the results page is reloaded, rather than opening the document.
Opera 7.54/Windows 2000: OK
Mozilla 1.7.3/Windows 2000: NO - (unsurprisingly) same as Firefox
Safari 1.2.4/Mac OS X 10.3.7: NO - same as Firefox
Internet Explorer 5.2/Mac OS X 10.3.7: NO - when you submit the search 
form, you get an error page with "NotesView error '80040fa0' - Notes 
error: Query is not understandable" (LOL)
Lynx 2.8.5/Linux 2.6.8.1: NO - from the welcome page you can't get to the 
search, since the "search" buttons are not also marked as links

So it looks like it's not transparent and accessible at all...

What it's most ridiculous (or sad) about this is that solving most of 
these problems only requires an average level of webmastering skills in 
terms of building accessible websites.

Also, some design choices (for example the use of Javascript to link from 
the results page to the single document page, or the use of buttons rather 
than links to get to the search form) are completely unnecessary and do 
not enhance the user experience in any way. But even if you wanted to keep 
them, it would only require some care to make them usable with all 
browsers and systems.
-- 
vb.               [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<------
http://bertola.eu.org/  <- Vecchio sito, nuovo toblòg...