I think I might be in danger of over-reacting to Odious Cinemas – after all, it’s not like I actually use them or anything – but what a tightwad, pursed-lip, arrogant bunch of pricks they seem to be. Once upon a time there was someone who spent his own time and effort – probably worth in the low six figures if you were going to buy that kind of consultancy off the open market – to make their site work, and instead of realising that he was doing them a favour, Odious laywergrammed him.
So then they get deluged with nastygrams from pissed-off geeks the world over, and how did they respond? Three months or so of complete silence. Finally, instead of realising that they could have retrieved some of their lost whuffie by being nice to Matthew Somerville, they slap a splash screen and a glorified text file on the front of the site, and pretend that this is somehow a big deal:
This page has information on accessibility matters. It will be updated with news if and when [my emphasis] there are any developments…
Note that it doesn’t say “we realise our website blows chunks and we’re doing something about it”. It’s saying “we don’t really give a shit what our customers think, but here’s a bone we’re going to throw to you little people over there”.
And then they go on to say:
We support the principles of the ‘Disability Discrimination Act’ (1995) and are committed to recognising and responding to the needs of all disabled people.
Call me cynical, but that looks like a lawyer’s idea of buying time just in case any of their pissed-off ex-customers decide that it would be fun to make an example of them by bringing a DDA case. Call me even more cynical if I point out that the change appears to have been sychronised with a less-than-complimentary article by Jack Malvern in The Times.
And then – and this is the funniest part of all – rather than spend a bit of time and money making the site accessible (after all, they’d get a cheap deal from Matthew Somerville) they go and pay a real live person to sit on the end of a freephone number to answer booking queries. Gosh, how positively 21st-century. Guess I should forget about ever getting an RSS feed from them, then.
I have to keep telling myself (aside from “calm down, you’re over-reacting”) that these people are the distribution arm of the clueless jerks at the MPAA, so why should they know (or even want to know) anything about online standards and how to keep their customers happy? After all, if we don’t play ball with them, they’ll just sue us, right?
