House.co.uk

As most readers of d4d™ know, I’m going to be moving house between Christmas and New Year (although a lot of it will be going on through January, but that’s just the way it’s worked out this time) so as part of that I need to close off my account with British Gas (who also supply my electricity). So I thought I’d make my life easier and do it all online at the site British Gas created for this kind of thing www.house.co.uk. Dear Christ, I wish I hadn’t.

The site is bloody awful. Not content with making it so it only truly works with Internet Explorer, the style sheets are so fucked it means that using Opera or Firefox with it is nigh-on impossible – text is superimposed over other text, and it’s basically just a sack of shit. To rub salt in the wounds, they bang on about how accessible the site is.

So I sent a complaint email to them, asking why it couldn’t be used in anything except IE. And the reply I got was – shall we say – complacent.

Thank you for your enquiry regarding the problems you have encountered on our web site when attempting to register impending house move. Please accept my apologies for not being able to give an earlier response to your enquiry.

Unfortunately the web site is only tested for Internet Explorer and at present you would not be able to use Firebox or Opera. When you have moved out of your property if you could take a reading from the meter and contact our Home movers section on 0845 6091133 and they will take the reading from you.

I hope this answers your enquiry

Perhaps rather more incensed by this than I should be, I enquired about how they could justify banging on about accessibility when they blatantly didn’t give a shit about anyone using any other browser than IE.

No, this doesn’t really answer the query. Your site blathers on about being accessible and so on – so why is it only tested on IE? And (from the look of it) designed with only IE in mind?

As someone who works with accessibility issues all the time, I’m interested to know how British Gas justifies their claims against the simple fact that the site isn’t accessible to those who prefer to use a browser with as many known security issues as IE.

Today I got a response from the scrofulous twadgeknockers.

Thank you for your email to house.co.uk, my apologies for any inconvenience caused regarding this matter.

Website designers will build their sites around the Internet browsers they expect their websites customers will be using. However, their expectations can be incorrect.

Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.1 and above is the only browser that is fully supported by the House website. This is detailed in the website terms and conditions section under the heading Using the website. Whilst you can access the site using other browsers, the availability of some parts of the site may be limited.

We are constantly updating and upgrading the site to ensure that people using other currently unsupported Internet browsers can access all areas of the site. This is backed up by our commitment that all new areas added to the site should be fully compatible with a wide range of Internet browsers and once this has been achieved, then the compatibility will also be made fully retrospective.

Once again, please accept my apologies that you have experienced regarding this matter

I know there’s going to be another reply (perhaps something about “Well check your CSS layouts then, fuckface”) but maybe that’s slightly aggressive.