Going postal for Christmas
December 21st, 2004 | Published in Technology, Politics
Zeldman: Going postal for Christmas
The sad thing is I don’t expect any better from our government. I think we could remove, oh, about 60% of our goverment “programs” and be much better off.
U.S. government sites that serve the public are legally obliged to be accessible to all. Which is undoubtedly why the site doesn’t work in Safari. Or Firefox. Or Opera. Or any Mac browser. Or any Windows browser except a recent version of Internet Explorer. This isn’t just me saying the site ought to work in more than one browser and OS; that’s what U.S. federal law says. But these are mere trifles.
How the site fails in non-IE-Win browsers is particularly galling. It would be one thing if the site immediately blasted error messages telling you to go soak your head if you don’t have the one browser and operating system combination it supports. But this miserable site actually lets you complete 99% of the transaction before failing inexplicably.