Site: Austin City Limits

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I first got turned on to the TV show Austin City Limits (ACL) when I was living in, logically enough, Austin, Texas (a town I still miss). One of the most amazing shows I watched featured Leonard Cohen — which is really surprising because before that show I hated his music. However, his performance that night was jaw-dropping (in the good sense). Years later, I remembered that ACL had a list of performers on their web site and I wanted to track down information about his appearance and dig up the song list.

I hadn’t been to ACL’s web site in years and when I went there I discovered the ACL home page is terrible. Typical music site black background with red links you can’t read. The Schedule page is a contrast disaster, especially with the small type. Concerning the contrast issue,. AccessColor said that:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 10.89% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 88.71% of the total the text.

The only information I could find about Cohen’s performance was on the Artist Anthology page (which also sucks). He appeared on ACL in 1989. To get the set list, I had to search the Internet. The show started off with “First we take Manhattan.” No wonder the show was great.

There are lots of problems with the ACL site. When I went to the page about Jakob Dylan’s performance and clicked on a picture, two windows opened up in IE7. The site also isn’t easy to navigate.

ACL is a national treasure and the site is a dump. ACL deserves much, much better.

Austin City Limits