I had given “the mean mouth” to Access Sites a couple of times recently about their Access Sites Showcase page. It turns out that my normal setup on Mac OS X with Safari 2 is the rare combination that had a problem with the page. Most people were seeing a perfectly readable page with a white background.
Here’s what I heard from the Access Sites folks, “We did test extensively on other platforms, other browsers and operating systems, and UAs like Jaws, Lynx, etc., knowing full well that people would be giving us the eyeball (plus we do care and try to do it right anyway), but it is possible we missed something. Based on your reply we took 240 screenshots today and it seems as if we may indeed have an issue on the Macintosh OSX 10.4 using Safari 2.0.”
So the short version of the story is that they will indeed tackle this one and I’m sure they’ll have it fixed ASAP. My job, now, is to issue this public apology to the folks at Access Sites for sending out harsh words in their direction.
I once again encourage all my readers to prepare and submit accessible work to them for consideration in their showcase. My original thought when I first heard of the site was what a great idea and I still think it is. Not only a great idea, but accessible to everyone, even Mac OS 10.4/Safari 2.0 (and every other device out there in page rendering land).