[Web4lib] Web technologies and public access

[Cloutman, David]

We had a situation where a patron couldn't use a catalog feature with
her WebTV box that was so old as to no longer be supported by MicroSoft.
The person in charge of our catalog decided to rollback a feature
because of the complaint, but had it been on my Web site I would have
gently told the user that they have an "antique browser" and that we can
support old clients beyond a certain point. For instance, I stopped
testing for Netscape 4.5.x on January 1, 2004, because I decided that it
was unreasonable not to move forward with supporting a browser that
hadn't been updated since 1998. I don't worry about IE 5 compatability
too much these days either.

That being said, I think it is an open question as to how accessible
Flash is to users with disabilities. I think you might run into text
that is not readable, depending on how you render it in your SWF. I
would encourage testing. Personally, Flash would not be my choice for a
library related web site, but I think AJAX also raises similar concerns,
and I'm very excited about what could be done with that technology to
facilitate better informaion retrieval. There is a lot of how and why
that needs to be asked before going with either of these technologies.
If Flash is your only realistic alternative to effectively implement
core functionality, then you have to go with it.

In the end, I think that if you can make your site usable to 98%-99% of
your users, you're doing pretty well. I think we would all like that
number to be 100%, but you're always going to have that one user out
there with really old hardware, and choosing to change your site to
suite their needs can be a difficult judgement call.

- David


---
David Cloutman <dcloutman at co.marin.ca.us>
Electronic Services Librarian
Marin County Free Library 

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of David McDonald
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 9:10 AM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: [Web4lib] Web technologies and public access


I received a rather verbose tirade about a specialty web site that our
library helped create.  We were involved minimally in the design of the
site as the committee decided to contract that out to an outside source.
However, I have been asked to respond to this sharp criticism of the web
site.
 
I know it's not perfect and I know there are problems.  We had to create
and design the site in about a month and half.  However, most of the
complaints he had were dealing with accessibility.
 
His primary complaint was that the web site required the use of Flash in
order to view some its pages.  Unfortunately, when he clicked on the
"update to the latest Flash player" link, he was confronted with the
following message from Adobe:
"We are unable to locate a Web player that matches your platform and
browser."
 
He states: "There is no need to use Flash, HTML can to the job."  He
then goes on to discuss the proprietary nature of Flash and that it is
not answerable to Canadian law ... blah, blah, blah.
 
In my opinion, Flash should not be considered something extravagant that
the average "citizen" doesn't have on his/her computer (or can't
download).  Libraries should feel perfectly comfortable using Flash on
specialty web sites as most people can use this type of software.
 
My questions to the group are:
To what extent do you believe that we should cater to patrons who may
not have the latest and greatest hardware and software?  Do we need to
kowtow to the lowest common denominator?  Should we include alternative
pages that require no downloads?
 
Thanks for any help.
 
Cheers
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
David S. McDonald
Systems and Library Technology Manager
Nova Scotia Legislative Library
P.O. Box 396, 
Halifax, Nova Scotia  B3J 2P8  
(902)424-5658 Fax (902) 424-0220
mcdonads at gov.ns.ca 
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