[WSIS CS-Plenary] About the UN document system, and lessons for information diffusion

[Taran Rampersad]

The bottom line is that it was designed by committee.

A camel is a horse designed by committee. A horse is a horse designed by
evolution, which means feedback (positive and negative) from a system
affected it's development such that it is a horse. A web site should be
the same; a web site should be constantly modified by feedback by the
system - which means users.

But most organizations have a subcommittee for handling feedback, and
that subcommittee has nothing to do with the camel/horse.

The problem is institutional, and also from getting people with no
expertise to create websites. Drop a decent CMS on most of these sites,
and they would become really usable - at a lower cost. But when you have
contracts with Microsoft and training from Microsoft, all your solutions
are limited to...

Andy Carvin wrote:

> While I'm never surprised with private sector or personal websites
> that have accessibility problems, it never ceases to amaze me when
> large public institutions have no understanding of the issue, or
> choose to ignore it. (It reminds me when the state of Florida
> published all of its hurricane preparedness information online this
> past autumn in PDF format only - totally useless to the blind.) I
> mean, all they needed were ALT tags and that would have alleviated
> most of the problems. It's just shameful...
>
> ac
>
> Carlos Afonso wrote:
>
>> Andy, this is typical of most web sites, unfortunately - not only the
>> designers ignore the WAI recommendations (many do not even bother to
>> know about them), but usually only test it on Microsoft Internet
>> Explorer, or another browser under Windows using the Microsoft
>> pseudo-Java virtual machine. And their project managers are even more
>> ignorant of it (either in the sense of not knowing or just
>> deliberately ignoring it).
>>
>> It is indeed incredible the UN seems not to worry about these issues.
>>
>> rgds
>


-- 
Taran Rampersad

cnd at knowprose.com

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