Anywhere in our luddite country? not likely. If I could read european languages, I'm sure I could find one in, e.g., Sweden.

Even if Section 508 doesn't require semantic markup, it still doesn't fix my primary issue with the site: zero findability. Let's see if I can find, say, a map of the DC metro from DC.gov. Probably a pretty common action. Except there's no link to it anywhere. Not that bad, I suppose - google brings up the first result, and most people would probably start there anyway. If I were adamant about using DC.gov to find it, though, I would have to click on "Residents" (what if I'm a visiting tourist?), find the "Ride the Rails" (what a worthless title!) link, find the Metro link (listed last - Amtrak is listed first. Do people in DC use Amtrak more than the Metro?), and then finally I find wmata.com. (what a useless domain name, why not.. oh.. dcmetro.com is being sat on.)

What's another piece of data I might, as a constituent, want to look up? Maybe something to do with politics. Maybe I just moved to the area and want to know who my representative is.

Government -> DC Council gets me a list of councilmembers and which ward they're elected from (ward1, ward2, etc), along with their phone number. Fairly useful, if I know which ward I live in. Let's see if I can figure that out from the website, without using google.

Live in DC -> Civic Information -> ehhh, nothing useful for my quest here. Let's try another route.

Search box: "ward" results in a search results page which lists some full-english questions (that look naggingly like the sponsored links on google's results), one of which ("Where can I find information about wards?" - if this is a frequent search, they should probably think about making this more prominent on the homepage) looks like it might be able to help me. The rest of the results are garbage.

Oh, damn. That link resulted in a 404. Of course, if I were someone normal I probably would have just googled "washington dc wards" and found the wikipedia page which gives me the information I wanted.

Now, let's see how it gives me information about parks. Parks are pretty important in an urban environment, right? Say I have a dog, let's see what it takes to find a dog park in washington dc with their site.

Residents -> Play in DC -> Parks and Recreation -> oh, damn. I just found a list of stuff that I don't really care about. Registry, department of parks, national park service... No, just give me say .. uh, a map of the parks? That's what I'm looking for. Maybe some events happening in the parks. Let's see if the Department of Parks link helps me. Ah, nope. Just a bunch of red links that look scary to click on and are impossible to skim (to find what I'm looking for). And a picture of some random woman in the header with the title, "Department of Parks and Recreation." I'm guessing it's someone who runs the stuff, but I wouldn't know from the title. Ah, here it is. In this list of serifed, red, bold links. Dog Parks. I actually have to spend about 10 seconds searching for the link again every time I go back to that main page listing. Those brightly colored boxes announcing aquatic programs and tennis programs kept drawing my eye over to the right, distracting me from what I was looking for. Alright, after clicking on "Dog Parks," I get another list of links. This is getting tiresome. Fortunately, one of them is "Dog park locations." Cool, there's two of them. Unfortunately, in order to see where they are on a map (remember, I hypothetically just moved here!) I've got to copy-paste the address into google maps. Why not just provide a link?

And the most prominent think on the "Dog Park Locations" page is uh. "Dog Park Rules & Regulations," a link to another page entirely. Not the locations. Weird thing is, a google search brings up a page from doggeeks.com listing even more dog parks than are listed on the dc.gov page. Good goin'.

Let's approach it as a developer. Say I want to make a mashup with one of their documented XML feeds. Can't find anything. I give up.

One cool thing, if rather hidden (findability!) is the school map. You have to go to that tiny dropdown on the bottom left of the main page labeled "Searchable Databases" (very useful title, by the way). Cool, there's a splash page with a screenshot of the tool and a notice that it's now available. That's nice, but I wanted to access the tool, not find out if it's available. I'd assume that going directly to the tool would effectively tell me that it's available.

In short: while I'm not belittling the sheer amount of information available on the site, actually finding and utilizing that information is an exercise in pain, suffering, and frustration. Information is worthless if you can't find it. It's a step in the right direction, and they got the hard part done (getting all the data digitized and available online). Now they just need to bring the interaction style (SELECT elements with onChange firing a navigation event? Welcome to 1999 and Usability Hell) and usability of the site into this century.

And this isn't even going into the HTML and CSS validation errors.

My comments aren't to belittle the engineers who worked on getting the information out there. It's belittling the fact that they hired cut-rate front-end developers and information architects, and ended up with a site that's mostly worthless unless you know its cthonic structure by heart. And it probably cost them a bundle, too, wasting their taxpayer's dollars by building a UI/front end that'll likely need to be rebuilt entirely from the ground up if they want people to, well, actually use the damn thing. And if the UI layer's code is anything as atrocious as the markup and IA is.. well, let's just say I'm glad I'm not the one spelunking my way through that guano cave.