Odeon website accessibility now a reality

You may or may not have been following the Odeon cinema website usability/accessibility saga over the last year or so.

I installed a Greasemonkey script written to improve the site, and it’s pretty interesting. It completely changes the interaction design of the site, and throws in a new feature – a link to the IMDB page for each film – which the original site doesn’t have! This is all completely without the say-so of the site designers. Of course, you can probably count the number of people using this script on the fingers of one hand, but the principle is interesting nonetheless.

3 thoughts on “Odeon website accessibility now a reality”

  1. These days, the odeon site has it’s own accessible version
    ahem – text version – which now even supports booking (wahoo) which it didn’t before. None of which is an appropriate solution, and it’s all done in patronising BIG TEXT (a major no-no in accessibility circles). Of course this still doesn’t address the problems the site always had – firstly, being painfully slow and almost impossible to use, and secondly having a booking process tends to fall over at the last hurdle, making it well nigh on impossible to book a ticket.

    I suspect Odeon wouldn’t want to link to IMDB information, which may well contain negative reviews!

  2. Thanks
    Actually my major motivation for writing that script was that I thought it would be funny :)

    Yes, I’ve been appalled by Odeon’s web presence since it first kicked off (even in IE I hated that slide-in menu system) and I was on the sidelines of last year’s Odeon debacle when I wrote this: http://www.strawp.net/odeon

    Their “Accessible” version, whilst it probably side-steps a law suit is just horrific IMO.

    I’ve had a fairly steady trickle of users installing that script in the last few weeks, but it’s by no means been “discovered” in a Slashdot reader’s sense of the word.

  3. Well, can’t say I noticed it
    Text version. Hmm. I just went for the big Batman image. It must say something about how they’ve built the site that it was easier for them to create a whole new version of it rather than make the existing one compatible.

    What’s also amazing is that there’s so much stuff on the net about how bad the site is – far more than any other. You’d think they’d take some notice. Stubborn buggers.

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