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anybody on here a Meetup.com organizer?

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From: Carin Headrick
Date: Oct 18, 2010 10:24AM


Hi. I'm an organizer of a group on meetup.com, and holy lord that site
could use some accessibility work.

There are some parts of the site that are easy as pie, but there are
several that need work.

First, it compiles a list of places you have met up before, but the only
way you can find them is to select the letter of the alphabet that the
place starts with. Problem! The letters only appear to respond to actual
clicks of the mouse! You can't simulate a mouse click, you have to
*click* it. So, to get around that, I have to search for a venue and
then it comes up with a link which I can then press enter on to select
that place as my place to meet.

The second area I have encountered is all the expand/collapse graphics
are also mouse-driven. Since by default everything is collapsed, this
makes things pretty hard to work with. After telling support I was
having problems, they auto-expanded bunches of my areas for me, but that
isn't a solution. It's a temporary workaround.

The third I have discovered today is it's next to impossible to add an
event host. You have to be a JAWS ninja to bend the site to your will,
and even then, you may have inadvertently clicked on things you didn't
mean to.

My question is is anyone on here an organizer at Meetup? Can they look
at how this stuff is done and tell me what is causing such strife so I
can educate Meetup support in technical terms what is the problem? I
have explained my difficulties to support, and they have:

a. sent me articles intended for developers on how to write good javascript,
b. not really read the history of my problem, and.
c. finally offered me a coupon I can give to the folks at FS so they can
have a look inside the organizer interface to see what is causing me
such pain.

I contacted FS, and after looking at the meetup site from a member's
perspective, they told me they felt no further need to dig deeper and
left me in the lurch. I told them they could do this for free because
Meetup offered them a coupon, and they declined. Don't even get me
started on the whole "what do I pay all this money for" jag.

So, since I don't have the support of FS, I was just wondering if anyone
here uses the site on a regular basis as an organizer and could tell me
why I run into such problems.

Thanks for any help, and apologies for the long and winding road of a post.

Carin