River Island says sorry to disabled users 22 Sep 2006

In March this year, River Island launched an all-Flash e-commerce website. At the time, the agency responsible for creating the site said: "Our design for the River Island website demonstrates the full potential of Flash technology. When used well, Flash is a fantastic platform for developing clean, efficient and intuitive websites. It allows you to create a really simple, easy-to-use site, and there's no jumping around from page to page, which seems to hinder so many e-commerce sites. This website raises the bar for fashion retailers."

Unfortunately, the site turned out to be completely inaccessible (and, as far as we can tell, pretty much invisible to the search engines to boot).

As you might expect, River Island has since faced a barrage of criticism and complaints from disabled users, disability rights groups, the press and concerned web designers. This has prompted the company to publish an apology, which we found today while browsing their site:

"To our disabled customers: an apology: River Island is aware that our website is difficult to use if you are disabled. We understand that this is unacceptable and are taking advice from web accessibility experts. We intend to make our website more accessible during 2006."

Sounds like the company has learnt a tough lesson. We applaud them on recognising their mistake and making a public commitment to putting things right.