The Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games has, in effect, been found guilty of discrimination in Australia for producing a Web site whose content is inaccessible to blind and visually-impaired visitors.
All this was the result of a single complaint from one person. Talk about David slaying Goliath.
We at NUblog, in our continuing commitment to accessible Web(-content) development, have written a Reader’s Guide to Sydney Olympics Accessibility Complaint, since the whole shebang is pretty long and complicated. Complete with full links to and quotations from the source document, of course, but lots of opinion. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
2000.09.02
How’s this for content management? The IOC has decreed that athletes may not recount their Sydney experiences on their own Web sites. But interviews by accredited journalists (NBC, anyone?) are just fine. Check the links – including a link concerning IBM’s defection from the Olympics – in the NUblog special report, Olympix à Go-Go!
We respect the Nua kids. But two recent publications hold largely contradictory views.
Writing for ClickZ, Gerry McGovern lists seven reasons why content sites don’t make money. But a Nua Internet Survey specifies that half of newspaper Web sites in the U.S. and Canada are in the black or making a profit.
The contradictions don’t end there. Two of McGovern’s reasons for unprofitability of content sites:
- Staff and technology costs are very high for Internet publications.
- Providing quality “instant” news on an ongoing basis is very expensive.
Well, God love ’im and everything, but McGovern joins the unending litany of critics who mistakenly equate “Web content” with enormous, high-profile, publicly-traded, over-ambitious Web sites. We don’t know how many times we have to say this: Salon is not the Web (or, for you math types, Salon ≠ Web).
Are we alone in savouring the irony that McGovern lists why content sites don’t money through an article on a content site that does make money? They do it by staying small.
And that may explain why the newspaper sites that are doing all right are doing all right: “85% of Web editorial staffs saying they have five or [fewer staff] on their team.”
Do we see a pattern here?
Posted on 2000-09-03