Web Accessibility of the Presidential Candidate Sites, December 9, 1999

Summary

Web Accessibility of the Presidential Candidate Sites is a look at the state of nine candidate Web sites primarily for their usefulness to handicapped visitors, but also for their effectiveness and clarity on compact-screen devices.

In our evaluation using side-by-side comparisons with standard access tools, no candidate Web site was found without some problems. In fact, no Web site of U.S. Presidential candidates fully met the first level of handicapped accessibility.

Overall, the sites' accessibility ratings place McCain at the top for proper redirection to pages appropriate for the browser, followed by Gore for attention to Level 1 access issues (but seriously marred by the automatic refresh), and Bauer, Bradley and Hatch with average sites. Buchanan, with otherwise excellent in-context links, falls down on the chaotic use of images, and Forbes, Bush, and Keyes trail for overall poor implementation of links in context and lack of page clarity.

• John McCain (http://www.mccain2000.com/) led the OrbitAccess Web accessibility ratings. His Web site provided browsers with pages which could be presented correctly, and whose links were relatively well described.
• Al Gore (http://www.algore2000.com/) was a close second, and was apparently the only Web site that was clearly designed to be accessible. However, his site creators' eagerness to use a page-refreshing feature was a serious mistake for handicapped access.
• The next sites, Gary Bauer (http://www.bauer2k.com/), Bill Bradley (http://www.billbradley.com/) and Orrin Hatch (http://www.orrinhatch.org/), had mediocre accessibility and ranked third, fourth, and fifth respectively. These sites appeared to make no deliberate attempts at accessibility, and their organization and link description provided expected barriers.
• Pat Buchanan (http://www.gopatgo2000.com/) held the Web site to sixth place, suffering from a disorganization and clutter that--despite often well-described links--made it difficult to navigate and an unnecessary consumer of the visitor's time and energy.
• Steve Forbes (http://www.forbes2000.com/) had excellent potential due to its fully contextual links--when they appeared. However, the automatic page refresh, unnamed links to databases, unnamed decorative images, and browser compatibility issues discharged that potential and placed it seventh.
• George W. Bush (http://www.georgewbush.com/) was eighth in the accessibility ratings, with a site crowded with unclear links; decorative, undescribed image maps; lack of page clarity; and browser compatibility issues. It was the site with the highest barriers.
• Alan Keyes (http://www.keyes2000.org/) had a site with almost everything wrong. Site frames had no alternative version. On Home Page Reader, auto-refresh ended up in endless loops back to the start; links were sometimes described, usually not; frames were without descriptive titles; there were no text links to previous pages in frames; some pages dead-ended in Lynx.

Election 2000 may be only the second election of the World Wide Web era, but it is more than thirty years into the age of disability access. That political figures calling for the confidence of the electorate cannot achieve even basic accessibility on their high-tech sites is disgraceful.

December 9, 1999

Candidate sites were revisited on January 21, 2000. Although the candidates' campaigns were notified in early December of the accessibility problems, none moved to improve their sites. In fact, candidates Hatch and Keyes increased their accessibility barriers.

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