The Problem With Paint

Twenty years ago my wife and I were looking for a cabin in Wisconsin's north woods. At the time, rural Wisconsin didn't enforce building codes and didn't require building permits. As a result much of the work done on cabins was done by their unskilled owners. This was especially true for deck patios. As we were walking through the cabin I would always walk out onto the deck and shake the rails to see if they where sturdy. A lot of the time the owner that built the deck didn't even bother to use treated lumber. In one case I walked out onto the deck and it was beautiful looking. It had a fresh new look since it was recently painted. I grabbed hold of the deck railing to shake it and my fingers sunk right through the paint and into the rotten wood. The problem with paint is that it can hide poor quality products.


The case of ADA (American Disability Act) web site compliance.

I was watching the news and there was a story about a small chain of coffee shops that was getting sued because a blind person could not order coffee. The potential customer claimed her reading software did not work on the site. The business owner claimed the site was compliant and certified. Since we develop sites that we claim to be ADA compliant I was immediately concerned. I visited the site to figure out what was going on. The site had a third party accessibility plugin. These plugins place an icon on the page the visitor can use to make the page easier to read. They are also supposed to use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to make the site ADA compliant. I clicked the icon and a dialog box popped up with a certification button and all the other controls to change font colors, spacing etc. I clicked the certification button and it popped up another dialog box claiming the site was certified compliant by the same company that made the plugin. I then proceeded to use the IBM Web Content Accessibly Guidelines tool to see how compliant it really was. There where 12 serious violations on the page.