I, along with many others in the web standards and accessibility designer community I’m sure, would love to hear why the new redesign of the Disney Store was not developed to W3C web standards and accessibility guidelines. They had such a wonderful site with Andy Clarke – valid and semantic XHTML markup, valid stylesheet and valid AAA accessibility – I’ve used it many times of what’s possible even at big corporation level. Sadly, I will have to move the site into the same (bad) example list as Amazon.co.uk.
How on earth did the benefits of web standards and accessibility not find its way into this version’s requirements specification? The code monkeys responsible need to get out of 1999 and join the rest of us in 2005. ASP.NET can produce valid code too (with some effort on the part of developers) so thats not an excuse to be using tables, spacer images, inline styles and inline JavaScript.
A shame, a real crying shame. With Christmas just round the corner disabled parents and children will find it difficult to use the site.
I originally tried to use the feedback form but it produced an error as the “desktop” database being used (Access) can’t cope with more than 4 users at a time and is unavailable. I’m also concerned it points back to the “design” studio responsible – does Disney expect them to send you negative feedback about their design?
View more comments over at Stuff and Nonsense (Andy Clarke’s blog).
UPDATE:
Molly has posted an open letter to Disney (seeing as feedback form and email is unavailable).
