molly.com
Wednesday 4 February 2004
you’ve got css layout
Imperfect as it may be, online service giant AOL is using CSS for laying out its pages now. It looks okay too, simplified, not butt-ugly, and actually more usable at first glance.
In other standards-related news, Mark Pilgrim’s “Orkut No Friend to the Blind” at WaSP describes some serious accessibility issues in Google’s new offering on the social networking scene.
Filed under: standards
Posted by: site admin | 04:42 | Comments (6)
I cannot understand for the life of me why major companies will spend so much time and money on a project, yet they don’t make it accessible for people with disabilities. Isn’t it a _good_ thing to make your project viewable and usable to everyone??
For example, 69 SuperBowl commercials were aired during the 2001 game. Each 30-second ad cost $2 million just for airtime, who knows what production costs were. Of these 69 commercials, just 17 were captioned for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. That means that 52 commercials were not accessible to millions of people around the world. After spending millions of dollars to produce and air their ads, 52 companies chose not to spend a couple of hundred more to caption them.
How can companies be so appalling stupid and/or uncaring? Oh, and congratulations to AOL.com for helping to promote web standards, hopefully more companies will notice and follow the trend.
AOL touching web standards?! Now I have heard everything
Technically, AOL funded a standards evangelism group for three years– yes, it was Netscape that organized it, but AOL still handed over the money. When you add up the salaries, benefits, assets, and so forth for that group (it was usually around ten people), that was over a million dollars a year AOL spent to spread the standards gospel.
I’m very, very glad to see something came out of it beyond that group’s efforts. Part of me wishes I could have been a part of the AOL.com redesign, but I think that indirectly, I was (as were all the other team members).