IMS_Blog

Anybody paying attention a few months ago may remember the whole Odeon accessibility thing. Well I’ve just noticed that the Odeon website now has an “accessible” version. Well, what they actually have is a text only version of their film times. Still no way to book online through that though, or register for exclusive special offers and film news, or even get your favourite cinema’s film times emailed to you each week. The design is terrible, as if some novice had simply hacked it together to look and feel as poor as possible. It took them that long to come up with this. I think I could have hacked something better than that together in a couple of days, so a professional…

Never mind, at least I can use the normal Odeon site. No, wait. Trying to simply continue to the normal site in Firefox (I don’t have accessibility problems, I just use a better browser) still lands on their original, broken Javascript front page. In other words they haven’t exactly been listening. The really annoying thing is that the accessibility information page shows they really have gone to some effort in most areas of their business. So why let the website suffer, when hiring a vaguely competent web design firm should quickly solve most of the problems (at least the main site might work in something other than IE—it’s obvious they believe there text based film times non-solution is acceptable for anyone not running the most outdated browser around). Hell, people have offered to fix it for free.

Odeon had a chance to regain some face after the bad publicity of shutting down the unofficial accessible site. Instead they’ve simply produced a botched job.

To be fair though, it’s not just the Odeon. In fact, they may be one of the better cinema sites. A quick trip in Lynx to my local cinemas’ websites: Vue got me nowhere. City Screen at least I could get to the film times though it took some navigating (gif is not appropriate alt text for an image). Unfortunately the promising Book Online link got me to a frames site, so I couldn’t go all the way. :-(