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

Summary of Evaluations

Each presidential candidate Web site was evaluated with the on-line tool Bobby (http://www.cast.org/bobby/), and those results checked by hand. No site passed Level 1 evaluation using Bobby. Gore's site passed the automatic evaluation, but failed the Level 1 manual checklist.

The most common problem was missing ALT text for images and scripts, causing clutter and potential speech reader confusion. This problem was checked for severity, and each link on the home page and pages closely linked to the home page was checked for clarity (that is, whether the link made sense out of the context of its sentence or visual placement). Download times are presented for typical dialup connections at 28.8K.

The IBM Home Page Reader was used on each site. Results were mixed, with meaningless or out-of-context links on every site except Gary Bauer's. Al Gore's site presented a unique issue: the home page refreshed itself every five minutes, interrupting other speech browsing in progress. Finally, John McCain's site correctly read the User Agent and redirected Home Page Reader to a non-framed page with in-context links.

Lynx evaluations were conducted on each site. Pages were checked for clutter (such as links without ALT tags, which are voiced by screen readers), required scripts, and other confusing elements.

Finally, OrbitAccess evaluated links based on their descriptive clarity when presented without surrounding context, and page clarity based on amount of superfluous information presented to speech readers or inadequate context for links.

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 Bush falls behind in overall poor implementation of links in context and lack of page clarity. Finally, Keyes had a site that did not function well in anything but a desktop graphical browser.

Explanation of Terms

• Missing ALT for images. The attribute that describes visual elements used as decoration or links was missing. In graphical browsers, this attribute pops up under a mouse pointer; in speech browsers, it is read aloud.
• Missing ALT for image maps. The attribute that describes what part of an image is selected was missing.
• No LONGDESC. The attribute that explains visual elements in detail or expands on their content was missing.
• No D Links. The full explanation of visual items or layout, or an alternative Web page for non-graphic browsers, was not available.
• No table headers. The explanatory information found at the top of a table was left out. This information describes the layout of a table for speech readers.
• Missing title frames. Framesets (screens divided into separate Web pages) contained no descriptive titles in order to assist the visitor in navigating to the frame (page) with the necessary content.
• Browser compatibility errors. Markup elements that only function on specific browsers were used. This can cause a page to fail or a browser to ignore required information.
• Download time. The time to load a full page at a dialup speed of 28.8K. Long downloads do not provide adequate prompting for screen readers, and the user does not know if the page has stopped or is still loading.
• Voiced images. Images were spoken by their filename because no empty (silent) ALT attribute was included.
• Meaningless links. Links were used whose names have no value or meaning when spoken, such as URLs (addresses) or filenames.
• Links without context. Links were used whose names are not complete enough to understand their action when they stand alone (such as "more" or "click here").
• Front door frame. The first page presented upon entering the website was a frameset, requiring an alternate markup called NOFRAMES for non-graphical browsers.
• Dynamic refresh. The contents of a page are fetched from the server and presented again to the user.
• Synchronized multimedia. Inclusion of captions or simultaneous descriptive text with image or audio playback.
• Screen scraping The page contents are shown by a text browser, and a companion program reads the displayed text. A screen scraper is not a speech browser, but a general-purpose screen reading application.

The following websites are presented in order of accessibility as determined by OrbitAccess using a combination of access tools.

Go to the first candidate summary: Gary Bauer

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