Media: Salon Embarrassed by Accessibility Error

Warning:  Reference to oral sex, lack of cross-platform design.
           (I don't know which is more offensive.)



http://www.salon.com/tech/inbox/index.html


Salon to AvantGo readers: We're sorry we called you "sex-starved losers."

Chalk this one up to the perils of new media publication. Yesterday 
Salon published an In Box item critiquing an advertisement in the 
LinuxJournal. Since the ad itself was not online, we thought we'd do 
our readers a useful service and create a new Web page featuring the 
advertisement. Hey, we're a Web publication, we can do all kinds of 
innovative things.

Unfortunately, we did not realize that Salon's publishing software 
would consider this page an actual Salon story. And we especially did 
not realize that readers of Salon who use the AvantGo service to 
download stories onto their PalmPilots would get, without any 
explanation, just the one sentence caption that we gave to the 
advertisement.

We can only imagine, with great horror, the shock that thousands of 
avid Salon Technology & Business readers must have felt when they 
were informed, oh so bluntly, that "You are a sex-starved loser who 
can't get a blow job -- so buy our product." We beg forgiveness from 
our readers. We'd like to promise nothing like this will ever happen 
again, but then again, you never know what kind of monster is waiting 
around the next corner in unexplored cyberspace.

We can assure you, however, that the senior Salon editor who was 
responsible for the fiasco has been sentenced to a year-long unpaid 
internship working for Matt Drudge. -- Andrew Leonard [5 p.m. PST, 
Nov. 29, 2000]

Here's the original ad's URL:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/11/28/server_ad/index.html

The copy reads something like "our servers won't go down on you
either."

-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Thursday, 30 November 2000 12:28:31 UTC