[LINK] FEMA disaster website IE-only

[Tom Worthington]

At 05:06 PM 9/7/2005, Roger Clarke wrote:
>http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050906-5278.html
>FEMA disaster website IE-only 9/6/2005 2:37:53 PM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher
>... What is surprising, however, is the fact that the Federal Emergency
>Management Agency's (FEMA) online registration site for disaster help is
>Internet Explorer-only. ...

A demonstration of modifying the home page of the Sahana emergency system 
to work on text only terminals, PDAs and mobile telephones, as well as 
conventional PC browsers, is at 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2005/wd/sahana.html>. As well as making the 
application more portable, it reduces the bandwidth needed. Sahana was 
built in a hurry for the December 2004 Tsunami and is being redone as an 
free open source tool <http://sourceforge.net/projects/sahana/>.

It is reasonably simple to fix a web interface to make it more portable and 
efficient. It is mostly a matter of deleting unnecessary code, rather than 
adding or rewriting software. There are some limitations in the way you can 
format your web page. I teach ANU undergraduates how to do it this as part 
of a web design course. The hard part is convincing the people in charge of 
a web site that they have a problem and it is easily fixed. I recall 
raising problems of emergency web site design with FEMA about a six months 
ago and offered advice based on experience with the Canberra bush fires, 
but didn't get a reply.

More on this, including Link links, at: <http://www.tomw.net.au/2005/ete.html>.

Also there is the full text of Shelby Canterford's "Evaluating Emergency 
Management
Websites" (yes, as one big PDF file) at: 
<http://www.watersprite.com.au/~shelby/emweb/emweb_final_report.pdf>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU  http://cs.anu.edu.au/people.php?StaffID=140274