#2 Worst Web Site of 2007 — Microsoft

Vincent Flanders’ comments: NOTE: Microsoft makes #2 because there is no reason for this type of amateur mistake coming out of corporation like Microsoft.

I was reading a post on a Microsoft blog about how the yet-unreleased Internet Explorer 8 passed the Web Standards Project's Acid2 test. Hmm…Microsoft and web standards in the same sentence?

One of the ADD thoughts that ran through my brain was, “Hey, go run Microsoft’s home page through AccessColor’s color contrast and brightness test.” The results will have nothing to do with web standards, just the ability to code a page in such a way that the text is readable against the background. It’s all about visual contrast and it's important to be able to read the page.

This is the specific Microsoft home page I ran through the analyzer and here are the results I received:

Click on the picture to see the complete results (382 Kb)

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 62.13% of the total text.
   A Fail message is displayed next to the HTML source line.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 0.53% of the total the text.
   A Warning message is displayed next to the HTML source line.

Now, I’ve never met a stupid person who worked for Microsoft (some have been a little too Lifespring-ish or est-ian for my taste), so I have to ask myself, “Don’t they understand it doesn’t cost millions of dollars to make your page readable?” OK, they’re stupid.

Microsoft’s Home Page (may or may not resemble the page I captured).