The McStorian

For those of you who work for the government, you’re well aware of how things function.  Generally one’s goal is to fulfill the stipulations of a regulation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the true intentions of that regulation are being addressed.  Web work is certainly one example.  My office is currently under the jurisdiction of 2 HQ webmasters (at least until my coup is successful), and of course we’re required to follow certain disability guidelines.  The webmasters insure that those regulations are followed, but they don’t take into account the purpose of the regulation: to allow disabled visitors to easily navigate the Army Corps of Engineers websites.  Well the sites are almost entirely table-based.  Most at HQ still use Frontpage, and I can only imagine what disabled visitors must go through if they try to look at any of our sites.  Yet, we all make sure to have captions on our pictures!  The world would come to an end if we didn’t name and caption each and every graphic.  So, I think people around here are missing the point that being compliant isn’t good enough – what matters is that all can access our site and navigate it easily.  That simulation of the web reader was “the best thing ever.”  I sent that to my boss and our editor to give them an idea of what it’s like to visit sites like that – with 800 million links and banner images.  I’m going to get this place turned around eventually!