Ontario election: Safari users out of luck

Today is election day in Ontario, Canada. This year is more interesting than usual, because we are also having a referendum on electoral reform. I won’t wade into the politics; head over to Pie Palace if that’s what you’re looking for.

I decided to do my civic duty early this morning, and as usual, I’m not on the voters list. So I cruised on over to the Elections Ontario site to find out where my local polling station is. On the front page, under a big, butt-ugly banner saying “Find out where you vote”, I see the following notice:

Note: If you are using a Mac computer, please use the Firefox browser to view the Elections Ontario site.

I was using a Mac, but I did happen to be using Firefox this time (I usually flip flop between using Firefox and Safari). I fired up Safari just to check, and sure enough, it doesn’t display properly — the navigation menu was nowhere to be found.

So, even though the site has voting information in 36 different languages, including Tamil, Armenian, and Hungarian, they couldn’t be bothered to make the web site accessible to a standards-compliant web browser. Weak.