visiting
http://acrobat.com/ with mobile safari is a special experience, one that very few companies provide to potential customers: the site tells you that you are using an unsupported browser
, and urges you to upgrade to a supported browser
. which is especially funny on the iPhone, because that essentially asks you to upgrade to a supported phone
.
clicking the supported browsers
link is interesting, too, because it takes you to a page listing the system requirements for acrobat.com
. and of course what they need is not actually acrobat (i.e., PDF) support but flash, because adobe pages — big surprise here — tend to be very flash-centric. given that i only wanted to look up information about acrobat products on the iPhone (where PDF is actually supported), i found it particularly strange to be greeted by such an unwelcoming page.
another facet i really liked about the page is how it sports an accessibility
link while at the same time being the prime example of how to not be accessible on the web (zero fallback information about the actual site). adding another nice touch, the accessibility link leads to the same unsupported browser
page, so unfortunately accessibility information is only accessible to those blessed with a supported browser
(it looks like adobe refuses to deliver its actually HTML-based accessibility page to mobile safari). what's most interesting about this is that adobe aficionados always point out that it is possible to create accessible content with flash or PDF, and in theory this indeed is the case. but if adobe itself does not care enough to actually do it, or maybe tried and was unsuccessful, then this tells us a fair bit about the real-world accessibility potential of those technologies.
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