Odeon Redux

I've just received an email from Matthew Somerville, the guy who Odeon forced to take down his accessible version of their website.

The email went as follows:

Hi,

Apologies for the impersonal-ness of this email. When Odeon made me take my website down, I got a lot of mail from people commiserating, offering their thanks, BCCing me letters they'd sent to Odeon, and so on, for which I was very grateful. The amount of mail was such that I didn't have time to reply, so put them all in a folder awaiting a day when I could spend time replying. It finally dawned on me that that folder is still there, I will never find the time, and a lot of people must think I'm very rude. So that day is now. Thank you to everyone who emailed me with messages of support. :-)

And fortuitously, today is also the day I write a GreaseMonkey script for Odeon, so that Firefox users (who currently get an unusable Odeon picture and nothing else) can use the Odeon website, should they wish to. http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/ has more details. All this does is make the website work on Firefox as it does on IE, the interface is sadly no better (well, except I removed the pointless flashing menu items, I had to do something ;) ). But better than nothing and trivial to write, which makes you wonder why Odeon couldn't be bothered to do it.

Any questions, do get in touch. I'll try to reply more quickly this time. ;-)

ATB,
Matthew

Now, all the complaining and moaning I and others did yielded a text-only version, but that was it and we'd all but given up, but Matthew is somewhat more tenacious than the rest of us it seems.

I think Matthew's statement that he produced something to make the Odeon site work in browsers other than IE easily, and why couldn't Odeon do the same, is very apt. This is a big company that makes a lot of money, they must have a web team to keep the site updated, so: HOW HARD IS IT TO MAKE THE SITE WORK FOR EVERYONE? The answer: easy, but apparently Odeon can't be bothered. Those browsers did account for just 5% of surfers, now it's over 10%, maybe it's time to start thinking of changing you dumb, ignorant, useless ********.

So, if you'd like to use the Odeon site and not be forced to use IE, take a look at Matthew's site.