Siu Lun

I’ve tried the Hong Kong consumer council website recently as I wanted to file a complaint against PCCW. See details.

I’ve discovered that their complaint form does not work at all on a Mac. This is most probably because it doesn’t work with Firefox, Safari and Opera. I haven’t tried IE but I have a sneaky suspicion that it will probably work.

I’ve found the issue related to a javascript form check statement crapping out.

I’ve e-mailed them about the complaints form with their enquiry form which seems to work. But have had no reply and it still doesn’t work a week after I’ve contacted them.

Whoever made it, didn’t test it properly. Whoever tested it, only tested it in IE. big fat FAIL.

I’ve got a dilemma lately. There is a client whom have asked for several companies to pitch in on a project.

Now what they’re looking for apparently is for IA proposals. I’m sure those who’ve been in the web industry long enough knows that Information Architecture is a service on it’s own. This is because it involves numerous excerises involving groups of people. It is similar to conducting a questionnaire on the street then analysing those results and provide an answer for the client.

How would you go about pitching for such jobs that requests IA proposals? Further more we’re not just talking about a single website, but a number of websites.

SVG, Canvas and all sorts of browser based graphical implementations are becoming more and more advanced. With this in mind, it is only a matter of time until the likes of Adobe’s Flash, Microsoft’s Silverlight and Browser based SVG, Canvas etc… will truly start competiting with each other.

However, while a lot of developers are running wild with SVG and Canvas already. What does this mean to screen reader users? The government in the UK and US has laws against discremination against disabled users.

So developers in the UK and US should not simply be running wild with these new technologies without thinking how best to make use of these features while keeping the page easy to use for screen readers.

To be perfectly honest, I would like to lobby the government to put an exception to websites once and for all. The web is evolving, the world itself is evolving. Disabled users should be taking advantage of the newest physical technology that can restore their ability. Rather than requiring us developers to architect such websites to work around such ill-lucked individuals.

UK and US’s disability laws and accessibility guidelines are simply driving up cost of development of websites and restricting the full potential growth of Rich Internet Applications.

If someone can come up with a way to make accessibility work while keeping the cost of development low. Then I personally own’t mind, but I’m sick of keeping that 1% of users happy and usable (if it is 1% at all! It’s more like 0.025%!)

I’ve always tried to optimise for screen-readers, but there comes a point when it is simply not feasible to do so and the government should recognise that and grant such websites immunity.

If anything, I feel a little discriminated against by the government as I of all other type of profession have to make information on the web easy to use for screen readers. It is like asking a hair dresser cut hair in a way that blind people knows what they look like!

It is unfair, it is a waste of time and it shouldn’t be done!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for accessibility and standards compliances! But this will become a major problem in 5 years time and needs to be addressed.

Furthermore developers in countries without such laws will gain an unfair advantage and will ultimately gain more business than developers in US and UK particularly when you take into mind that the web is essentially a global village and that business dealings can happen over it very easily.