Citylink's new site

In Melbourne we have a traffic authority who have an automatic tollway / gate system that deducts funds from your account. Now, like every public service, people have their grievances†.

In the case of transurban, it’s how ‘citylink’ choose to conduct their business and treat their “customers”. (Its probably not worth going into what I’ve seen, but just think “like a bank ”)

Recently, @pda alerted me to the fact that they had indeed updated their website. Visually, its a reasonable improvement, however—

† Here comes one of those grievances

All logged in sections of the site use Adobe® Flex for the interface.

This is a web tragedy:

• I can’t check my account status on my mobile phone
• I can’t check my account status on my iPad
• If I was using a screen reader, I’d be fucked

From the Adobe Flex documentation

"By default, Flex accessibility features are not enabled. 
When you enable accessibility, you enable the application 
to communicate with a screen reader."

I find it beyond incredible that a “professional” web developer would choose such a technology, for a government entity, for such a deployment.

The original designer of the site @michaelcassius tweeted that he designed it four years ago. I guess that’s a fair insight into transurban.

Update: Michael Cassius mentioned to me that while he worked on the project, it was done so while he worked with the team at Citrus.