What I am most surprised about this is that the administration quickly got this up using Drupal, because they were able to leverage a free software CMS. No that their initial install was perfect, they took a pretty accessible CMS that produces nice valid xHTML Strict code and made both worse in their theming/implementation.
Rather than learning anything from the previous install they rewrote it in ASP and reproduced or even enhanced the accessibility problems that were there in their first attempt. It's frustrating to see how little money people are willing to contribute back to making a good tool better and how easy it is to just toss millions at a vendor in order to give a site (that was only about 6 months old at this point) a fresh coat of paint.
So much more could have been done to improve the accessibility if their approach to their website was more collaborative & long term in nature.
Slashdot Mirror
What I am most surprised about this is that the administration quickly got this up using Drupal, because they were able to leverage a free software CMS. No that their initial install was perfect, they took a pretty accessible CMS that produces nice valid xHTML Strict code and made both worse in their theming/implementation.
Rather than learning anything from the previous install they rewrote it in ASP and reproduced or even enhanced the accessibility problems that were there in their first attempt. It's frustrating to see how little money people are willing to contribute back to making a good tool better and how easy it is to just toss millions at a vendor in order to give a site (that was only about 6 months old at this point) a fresh coat of paint.
So much more could have been done to improve the accessibility if their approach to their website was more collaborative & long term in nature.
Thought folks here might be interested in this story about an angle on that $50 million:
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http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?theaction=61
Wasn't just Microsoft, but the RBC put in a few million too.