Government services are usually designed to be accessible to everyone. The blind, the deaf, and the lame can all apply for employment insurance benefits in their own government-assisted way. But not Macintosh users. Here’s the message that greeted me when I tried to apply for my benefits online:
A: Knowing that the vast majority of the Canadian public access the Internet using PC (not Macintosh) computers, our priority is to deliver our on-line services on the platform of choice for the majority of Canadians. In the shortest amount of time while being cost effective, the current EI on-line application was developed to support Windows-based versions of Internet Explorer. The versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape that run on Macintosh computers are quite different from those supported on a Windows platform and therefore process JavaScript and XML differently.
Does this strike anyone else as just plain wrong? I’d love to send them a nasty email…
The funny part is that in Canada all services have to be provided in French as well as English. English is obviously the “platform of choice” for most Canadians but that doesn’t mean that they don’t support the minority, even when it means absolutely indecipherable URLs that include BOTH the English and the French acronyms for government departments.