Sign Of The Times

Under the Obama administration’s new Transparency-and-Accountability policy — which applies to Bush-era mischief very selectively, at best — the Justice Department has posted nine Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos online.

The Department of Justice web page from which the memos are accessed manages to capture the ambivalence of the Obama administration’s T-and-A policy perfectly:

Due to public interest in this matter, the Department of Justice is releasing these documents in an inaccessible format.

Comments

  1. Jon says:

    I headed over to the site and downloaded one of the memorandums in PDF format. Reads just fine on Preview. That line you quoted above is still there though. Seems perfectly accessible to me. Am I missing something?

  2. sarabeth says:

    This seems to be the DOJ’s way of alerting people to the fact that what they’ve posted are pdf files.

  3. matt says:

    they are inaccessible to people with disabilities. i guess they are waiving ADA for now. it’s a hilarious little sleight of hand they have going on there, rushing out bush memos for people to gawk at, while fighting behind the scenes to preserve most of the findings.

    his supporters must be so proud.

  4. sarabeth says:

    they are inaccessible to people with disabilities.

    why?

  5. matt says:

    what am i, disabled?

    http://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm

    b. Problem: Documents Are Not Posted In an Accessible Format

    State and local governments will often post documents on their websites using Portable Document Format (PDF). But PDF documents, or those in other image based formats, are often not accessible to blind people who use screen readers and people with low vision who use text enlargement programs or different color and font settings to read computer displays.

    Solution: Post Documents in a Text-Based Format

    Always provide documents in an alternative text-based format, such as HTML or RTF (Rich Text Format), in addition to PDF. Text-based formats are the most compatible with assistive technologies.