Election website still locked
Despite a complaint being laid with the Human Rights Commission for excluding non-Internet Explorer users from the Elections.org.za website, the South African Independent Electoral Commission’s website is still unavailable to many users.
Citizens using browsers other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Windows are greeted with this message" "Our server detected that you are using a browser or operating system (e.g. Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome etc.) which is currently incompatible with our website. The current website is only compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer V4 (and upward) on the Windows operating system."
Originally reported in August by Tectonic the message that greets non-IE users has been updated to reflect the release of Google’s Chrome browser. The organisation has also added a link to the SMS verification line on the front page. Apart from that, however, the remainder of the site is inaccessible to users of browsers such as Safari, Firefox and Opera. Some of those browsers do, however, include a "compatibility" feature that can be used to mimic Internet Explorer to gain access to the website.
In September Aslam Raffee, chair of government’s OSS and Open Standards Working Group, Daniel Mashao, chief technical officer of Sita, and Helen King of The Shuttleworth Foundation together filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission saying that "the IEC’s decision to make its website inaccessible to everyone except for purchasers of a proprietary product violates the rights set out in the Constitution."
The South African government has a published set of minimum standards for interoperability and the complainants argued that excluding non-IE users from access violated these.
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