The other night we had an eye emergency in the family, and I desperately needed the phone number for the Oregon Eye Specialists. As you probably know, I use FireFox. Well, guess what happens when you go to that site in FireFox? Nothing! Absolutely nothing. Just a blank blue screen. No alternate content, just blank (Yes, Flash is installed). In my haste I went back to Google to track down the phone number. Later, I gave it a try in IE, and what do you know, it worked. Now if this isn’t the ultimate irony that an eye doctor has a completely flash-based movie (I won’t dignify it by calling it a site), that’s almost completely inaccessible by most definitions, I don’t know what is.

I think someone needs to educate whomever developed this flash movie. Get a clue! For a site that very easily could have site-impaired users, using alternate browsers, it’s unacceptable. Not to mention the search engine traffic they’re missing out on with this design. I don’t even want to think about how much the clinic paid for this site.

Start by reading more of Molly, Andy Clarke, and spending some time at the W3C’s web accessibility site.