The article.
And quote:
“Mike Quealy, a FEMA spokesperson, explained to me that they are aware of the issue, and are currently working on a application that supports all of the most popular browsers. Quealy said that the application in question was originally an in-house tool, meant to be used by call center people. Internet Explorer was the official in-house browser, so the application was coded with IE in mind.”
How about designing a site to be cross-browser friendly (aka: base web standards) from the start?
From a consulting standpoint, who ever wrote the app will probably have to come back out to redo the IE code and get paid on top of what they got paid when they started. You really want to consult with these folks? If it was done in house, then this was short-sighted thinking on the part of those responsible for building the site.
Is it a big deal? Consider this: IE doesn’t run on Linux. IE is no longer supported on Mac. That’s now a healthy number of people your site can’t help. For an e-comm website, I’d say “who cares?” because that was the e-comm’s decision to make their site inaccessible to this market. But a government website?