website usabilty checking software...$550?!?

[rafiki55]

http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55190,00.html

A invaluable program or a waste of money? For $550, I don't really seem too many people using it, as you could learn how to make your website complient and accesable.

What are your thoughts?

(I wonder how they got a story or wired.com, it doesn't seem "news worthy" just my 2 cents)

[UnderTheSun]

Usability is a logic, and a sense you develop as you see, develop and create sites. Time and time again, you learn more and more usability improvements that can be used on a site.

It makes this tool more worthless to the expert web designers who are experienced, but it helps the newer web-designers. Middle-ranged web designers would also be greatly helped with this product.

The problem is who will buy this product? the term "usability" and "accessibility" won't seem very appealing for the smaller web design companies, and it costs 550 dollars.

Probably macromedia will help it with promotion, but you never know, it might get big.

[hurricaneone]

In a world where designers even go as far as to ignore Netscape users, changing common practice to make it standard for designers to consider users with usability issues seems a big stretch. But it really should be taken into coinsideration, especially by larger corporations, and for them $500+ is less than pocket change.

Of course, the larger corps probably expect their $50,000+/year full-time developers to be able to spot javascript errors.

Now, the big question is, can this fine and dandy 'ware spot the design flaw of (for example) 13 animated gifs all rotating ad-infinitum on the same page... well, lets just say, I doubt it.

[nocrapchurch]

From the article on wired.com
Despite progress, websites today are still three times harder for users with disabilities to use than for other users.

Where did they pull that stat from?

Actually, for large projects, the software may be worth the money depending on how accurate it really is. For a twenty page website, I wouldn't spend the money.

A company I'm working for has a QA department of about 20 people that constantly test our systems for bugs, inconsistencies, and mess-ups.

-scott