Posted on March 21, 2008 at 12:49 am | 
By 
In a recent post about a Peters Pink Boat I came across a Web site which has to be the most inaccessible Web site I have ever seen.
“Bloom in the Park is the largest and most spectacular gardening event in Ireland, hosted by Bord Bia. Its a competition of sorts where gardeners can get creative as they like.”
The Bloom in the Park Web site should get a Golden Razzie. The site is one big image thats probably been run through a Dreamweaver chopping shop. Everything is an image right down to the text.
The competition is all about “getting creative” and obviously the organisers like things that look nice. (Note to organisers not everyone who uses the Web can see.)
I’ve seen a lot of bad sites and most could be put down to lack of knowledge and experience. In such cases the developers usually demonstrate that they did their home work and with a little research they did their best to make their Web site as accessible as they new best.
Chances are the developer marked up headings incorrectly, hard coded a few spacer gifs and forgot to provide alt text for images, but they gave it their best shot. With a little encouragement these developers can only get better and they do.
Part of the problem with accessibility is understanding, some people just cant think outside the box while others are not paid to think outside of the box. I’d love to know what their excuse is. It was the same last year.
This Web site clearly demonstrates the wool being pulled over the clients eyes, but is that good enough excuse, surely in this day and age they could manage to pull of a Single A compliant Web site?
15 Comments
So far,
March 23, 2008 @ 
to help people understand the benefits of best practice design…
john conroy
i think you’re being a tiny bit harsh here. i mean it looks good and it works, far as I can see.
but on the other hand i can’t understand why ppl would actually sit down and build some minor .asp monstrosity these days when they could just go get Joomla!(in this case) or Drupal or soomething. (i mean, it looks to me like someone actually sat down with Dreamweaver, as you say, and –shock– built this thing from scratch.)
we really are still cavemen in Ireland when it comes to web development. with one obvious exception being Segala, of course. Go Heinz beans!!