My friend “Gary” told me the other day he was working on a site for a government agency. A few days before the launch his boss asked him “Do you know anything about Section 508 Compliance?”. Uh oh.
The site was built in Cold Fusion and had all these weird iframe-like sections that you can’t even tab into or out of in a browser window. Absolutely totally not accessible in the least.
But then he told me what the site was for. It was a site that is for registering for a motorcycle operators license. I burst out laughing.
I know I know, there are probably lots of reasons this site should be accessible anyway, but you gotta admit it’s kind funny. If you are getting applying for a motorcycle license, chances are you can see and you have normal functioning motor skills.
lol indeed ;)
There are other kinds of sites for which accessibility idealism and zealotry seem not only unnecessary, but even wasteful. No matter how much time and money you spend making as much of your content as possible accessible to users with special needs, someone with a visual impairment just isn’t likely to play Flash games or watch movies.
‘a visual impairment just isn’t likely to play Flash games or watch movies’
Please say you’re joking aren’t you?
If the content is accessible then people with visual impairments will use it.
well this reminds me of an excerpt from a book where 2 young men aka boys got on a motorcycle and were riding it around the high school running track because they knew where the turns were. Yes they were blind.The reason I have landed on your site is because I am a windows user and when I try to use the starkers wordpress theme I am unable to copy all the files because some of the files have the same name as the folders and thus the theme is incomplete and if I knew how to reconstruct it I would not be intently watching your tutorial on word press design.Thanks for the video.
Bill B.
Just found this – pretty damn funny. Quite amazing how few people that aren’t hard core designers even know 508 exists, though.