The Cooperative Bank’s online banking system has been upgraded. Until recently it was an effective but rather grumpy Java applet. When it worked, it was great, but for Mac and Linux users like us it could be a right pain. Fonts would display strangely, keyboard input would break, sometimes it simply wouldn’t start, and this led to us having to use an old version of Netscape 4 just for checking our accounts.
The new system seems to be much better - it’s HTML, and they’ve made sure it works with the Mozilla page renderer. The layout is clear.
But the new system also does some rather odd things. Any attempt to use the Back, Forward or Reload buttons, or keyboard shortcuts causes it to log out the user, who then has to log in all over again. Use tabs and something odd happens: all the tabs will contain the last page opened as a tag. And the HTML source includes two head blocks, one each side of the body block.
The explanation given is:
“The browser`s navigation functions and keyboard shortcuts have been disabled for security reasons and because the Internet Banking service has been designed to be more accessible to all customers, including those with disabilities.
We have designed the service to meet the W3C ëAí standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, which has been set up to promote world wide standards of access and to encourage wider use of the internet.”
Very strange.
