From The Cranky User : Passion - 24 April 2007
Sometimes, what it takes to get an institution committed to a new course of action is simply for one person to make it a priority. If no one cares strongly about usability it's not going to happen. Few Web sites are as awful as those driven by a mandated checklist. Such formalized requirements ultimately miss the point. I once came across a usability standard that mandated JavaScript pop-ups to warn people when they were leaving the set of fully accessible pages. As a standard, it was incoherent at best: many of the people who need fully accessible pages don't have functional JavaScript, and many more might find that the implementation actually prevented them from following links!
If you care passionately about usability and accessibility, and you want your organization's Web site to be usable, you will have to convince people it's important. People who don't think about usability aren't going to suddenly start thinking about it because the boss sends out a memo. So make the case for usability. It starts with you.
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