UK Political Parties fail Accessibility Test, claims Agency

All three leading parties in today's UK General Election have fallen short of British standards in digital accessibility, claims accessibility consultancy Cimex, who called on them to improve their websites ahead of voting to little effect .

'Accessible websites are now a legal requirement under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) so we decided to look at how the political party websites perform in the run up to the election,' says Aspasia Dellaporta, user experience expert at Cimex. 'In the UK there are 10M people with a registered disability, so it doesn’t make sense to exclude a significant part of your voters.'

Although the degree of compliance was varied and all were making some efforts, none of the parties offered websites that were completely accessible to disabled people, despite manifesto promises to take issues of access seriously.
Cimex assessed the sites using W3C accessibility guidelines, globally recognised as the gold standard and the JAWS 5.10 screen reader, used by many blind people.

'A blind user would have to press the tab key from the keyboard more than a 100 times to fully navigate the Conservatives' homepage,' continues Dellaporta. 'There are no headings, which are needed by screen readers to give the blind user an overview of the webpage they are on, and videos lack subtitles for deaf people.'

The Liberal Democrats fared as badly, but for different reasons: 'Orange may be the LibDems signature colour but set against white, it gives the partially sighted enormous problems and is not ideal for sighted people either. Moreover, the site lacks consistency, and where headings are used they are not coded carefully across the site.

'The navigation is split across each page and you cannot get a clear view of what you are doing and where you are. In addition, the main menu is in capital letters, making it hard to read, especially for dyslexic users.

'However, the LibDems are the only ones who provide synchronised captioning for their videos which are accessible for the deaf. So they did very well on this.'

The Labour Party was the most accessible site of the three using Cimex' evaluation methods. The main issues on this site revolved around the form for joining the party. 'When a blind user navigates the form, the fields don’t speak well with JAWS screen reader and the user is left clueless of where and how to input their credit card details. The Labour part needs to take a more holistic approach to accessibility and test the site with disabled users.' The Labour Party site is the only one of the three to include a compliance statement which acknowledges that: 'The Labour Party recognises the need for sites to comply with the best practice, legal and regulatory guidelines. While we are not yet 100 per cent compliant with best practice we are working hard to ensure that we move towards this goal.'

Cimex urged both the Conservatives and the LibDems to take a critical view of their website and learn from their mistakes, pointing out that they need to do more research on accessibility and test their sites with disabled users. The sites have not improved in time to have any potential impact on today's voting.

Cimex says the research was carried out independently and with no political bias as part of its commitment to promote best practice in website design.

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