As a Government web developer I did too, and I do believe agencies TRY to keep their websites accessible, but the trouble is there’s a culture of everything being done at the very last minute and so of course usability and accessibility always suffer.

As someone who’s passionate about both it’s incredibly frustrating! We do the best we can do but at the end of the day it’s the managers who call the shots, not the web developers. It will be a happy day when accessibility is policed as harshly here in Australia as it already is overseas.

I have a sinking feeling the 1x1 pixel images are associated with the table based layout?

john

very much so — I lost sight of the whole data/api thing so irritated was I at the user experience/accessibility aspects.

I was going to write about crowdsourcing the data — you know, rather than one anonymous shopper a month, build infrastructure to let people email, sms, and otherwise provide pricing data based on their shopping experiences.

If you’d like to hear more about that, I’ll be touching on it here

http://lgwebnetwork.org/conference/

in my keynote presentation

john

Can you give more details about firewalls blocking RSS? I haven’t seen this in the wild or heard of it much.