Connection Café: Presidential Online Scorecard: Accessibility

	Presidential Online Scorecard: Accessibility
	Posted by Brandy Reppy at Aug 08, 2008 02:43 PM CDT Categories: Accessibility

In light of Misty McLaughlin's post Presidential Hopefuls Scorecard, and with AIR Austin creeping up on the horizon, I thought I would take a few minutes to briefly review the accessibility of the sites of Barack Obama and John McCain. (This will be based as much as it can be unbiasedly on accessibility - wish me luck!)

Barack Obama

Pros

Graceful resizing for anyone who needs larger fonts.
Commendable job separating content from design. Turn off the style sheets on this site and you end up with a decent job of pure content, and *gasp* skip links to jump over the navigation.
Tabbing is fairly intuitive (for all of our mouse-free users out there) and seems to allow you to navigate through the site almost as if you were using a mouse.
Closed captioned multimedia options - which means everyone has access to the content in the speeches.

Cons

The contrast of the links to the background in some places is no where near distinct enough and could cause problems for people with visual impairments or old monitors.
There are quite a few images with no alt tags (not even blank ones), and that can mean big trouble if you're a screen reader user.
A couple of bad moves when it comes to the use of headers, using them for style instead of substance

John McCain

Pros

Graceful resizing for anyone who needs larger fonts.
Again, tabbing is fairly intuitive making it at least mostly able to be navigated by keyboard-only users.

Cons

No closed captioning or alternative accessible features for multimedia. (The only option is a PDF brief of the speech.)
Mediocre separation of content and design - in most parts tables are used to control positioning, which means trouble for a lot of people.
Some links open in new windows with no indication - which completely disables the back button and hindering backwards navigation to the rest of the site.
Absolutely no headers used on the site as far as I can tell - which means no indication of information heirarchy and challenging navigation for screenreader users

The Results

I wanted to give you an even list of pros and cons on both sites, but the drama wasn't there, gang. Kudos to Barack Obama's team for taking them time to include accessibility (and web) best practices into the website. McCain clearly has a lot to learn about the web as a medium and about the millions of people in America and around the world who have disabilities that impair the way that they use the access information on the internet.

This is a big pass to Barack Obama with flying colors, making the score 1-0.

PS - Side note - Convio is proud to announce that we will have TWO teams competing in the AIR Austin competition in October. Good luck teams - we'll be sure to post the results as they come in! Learn more about AIR Austin by checking out the Knowbility website.