Why Platform Independence is Important
Dec 2nd, 2005 by Karen
For more than three months I’ve been meaning to listen to OCLC’s Long Tail Symposium from ALA this year. Today I squeeze out a few minutes to go look at the link and click on it only to be told “Your operating system is currently not supported by this presentation.” Yet again I’m being penalized because I’m one of those radical Mac users. I switched to Mac because I wanted to be able to work on with Open Source Software and be more familar with a *nix environment for my job. It was my personal choice but I don’t regret it for a second. Such experiences just make me really annoyed. For OCLC to have a whole document on their website that talks about web usability and accessibility and then not make their presentation accessible to users on multiple platforms seems at best ironic. The beauty of putting up conference materials on the web is that it makes them available to a wider audience than those attending the conference. By putting them up in format which is not platform independent the audience which they will reach is reduced. The bottom line is that as much as I want to see the Long Tail Symposium I doubt I remember and find time to look at it on a PC. Lesson learned: barrier to access equals content ignored.
I often run into this myself as I use both linux and osx (no windows). I can tolerate the ones that say “you may have difficulty” but still let me in, but ones that completely log out are just retarded. Often I end up spoofing the user agent and getting in and viewing fine with no problems. Things have come a far way on alternate platforms and on my linux box I can play pretty much any content type so there is really no excuse. It’s just rude.