A few months ago, two major belgian newspapers launched an "accessible" version of their respective websites. In their own words : the site has been rewritten according to rigorous accessibility guidelines. Great... now maybe they will - at last - figure out that they paid twice for an awful job since :

  1. The full blown ("unaccessible") version of their site is pure tagsoup with frames for one and an applet for the other...
  2. The "accessible" version is incredibly ugly and just ghettoize people with disabilities in a scaled down web experience. The people responsible for this obviously have no clue about the accessibility benefits of web standards. Not to mention that the "accessible" mark-up is far from perfect... access keys, anyone?

I wonder who are the "accessibility" experts they hired to produce such a nonsense... do they ever heard about the "one markup fits all" paradigm? Why the hell maintaining two versions when a single, carefully designed site can be both accessible and good-looking?