the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO). Just
look at some sites given excellence awards by AGIMO and you can see
that the Australian government are luddites when it comes to standards
or accessibility.
The AGIMO awards for excellence
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/AustWeb.html#roadready
Tim
On 13/02/2007, at 10:15 AM, Ben Buchanan wrote:
>> From the Australian Tax Office page I landed on from a Google
search
>> on
>> applying for a Tax File Number online:
>> Please note that Mozilla is only able to be used if certain system
>> requirements are met. However, Mozilla is an open source
application
>> and the chance of it being supported is unlikely.
>> I almost can't believe it. I will be writing to them.
>
> This is essentially why I don't lodge tax forms electronically. If
> they are that clueless, why would I trust them to handle the data?
>
> Mordechai said:
>> Netscape 6+, but not Mozilla? Never mind that they're willing to
>> support
>> a browser used by <1%, but not one used by >12%.
>
> Well note that they say Mozilla, not Firefox. My guess would be
> they've not really updated their site in years. So it's not a
> conscious decision about Firefox, it's a sign of a system that's not
> been updated much.
>
> Given that it's a seriously large government organisation, my bet -
> without so much as looking at the code - is that some big-name
vendor
> sold them some big-name product for many many millions of dollars.
In
> general, the big-name, off-the-shelf products do NOT come from
> standards-aware companies. They tend to come from companies that
> started developing PC applications and moved (with the same staff)
to
> online delivery. PeopleSoft is a classic case - it was a desktop app
> before it was an online app.
>
> The thing about desktop->web conversions is that programmers were
> trained for relatively known environments; so their methodologies
are
> not geared to something like the web. Plus there's nothing to say
they
> got any training for the transition so who can really blame them for
> using tables - it was what worked at the time and it got them to
> go-live.
>
> So anyway the big vendors (and the agencies that implement them)
are a
> seriously large goal for standards advocacy. They are very hard to
> approach (beware, sweeping generalisations ahead):
> - they already have the big contracts/business so they don't care
> about cost/competition
> - the consultants who implement them are paid by the hour so they
> don't care about efficiency
> - all companies concerned are big enough to just fight accessibility
> cases rather than build accessible products
> - they have "quality assurance" procedures based around the way
> they've been building things for years now; so they may even think
> moving to standards would break their QA system and reduce quality.
> seriously! :)
> - the big companies often leave interface design and development to
> the programmers, usually by default of not providing anyone else. it
> just gets lumped onto the coders. it's not their job, they're not
> trained for it, nor is there any reason to think they enjoy it
> (they're there to code!) so no wonder it's rarely done well!
>
> Just some thoughts anyway.
>
> At some point there must be an "in", an opportunity will come up to
> win over the big challenges. I'm not quite sure what it will be, but
> I'm hoping that the industry grabs it when it comes up! :)
>
> - Ben
>
> --
> --- <http://www.200ok.com.au/>
> --- The future has arrived; it's just not
> --- evenly distributed. - William Gibson
>
>
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