Website Design & SEO Tips

As the election looms I thought I would look at whether each major political party really means what it says with regard to accessibility, and just how careful they are about complying generally with accessibility guidelines and the accepted rules of the internet. 

I have first looked at the Labour Party website and with regard to accessibility they say;

The Labour Party is an inclusive member-based organisation that prides itself on being accessible to all who share its values.

We believe that it is important to make our website accessible to all potential users. With this in mind we have worked hard to improve the website for people with all disabilities and impairments.

We aim to ensure the availability of “alt text”, a simple and clear approach to online layout and improved colour contrast.

Excellent! Or so I thought.  I suppose it is an oversight then that  on the home page of  The Labour Party website there are over 40 Warnings on use of colour.  Are they really that committed to “being accessible” when there are 25 errors in compliance with the accessibility requirements of WCAGv2 and 1 warning?  And remember this is only on the home page.

Now, that “alt text” the Labour Party refer to on their website, that surely must be there – but no, along with the other 83 html coding errors and 45 warnings, there are alt attributes missing.   It goes without saying that we want a government that is careful and conscientious but even the meta tags on the website are wrongly constructed, the 404 headers fail and there is no main header h1 tag, a website basic.

Tranparency and clarity must also be requirements of government however having looked at the source code for the home page aswell as the view as seen by a search engine there is clearly a great deal of text that is available to the website visitor BUT NOT to the search engines.  The section of text not appearing in the search engine view is the scroll of donators comments, I am hoping this is not to ensure that the search engines only see what the labour party want it to see whilst the website visitors see more.  I was a little stunned by this and so have run the site through numerous online textual content extractors but they all show the same search engine view.  Do let me know if I am wrong on this.

Additionally from an SEO point of view the text to code ratio only comes out at 5.97% but this might be because of the factor mentioned above whereby the picture The Labour Party are showing the electorate is quite different from what they present to the search engines, in my opinion.

I have no political affiliations and shall now proceed to perform the same brief analysis on the other major party’s websites.

If you want to see how we can help your website see our web design website or our SEO Commercial website.

Gill Keeble
S3 Web Design and SEO4all

Related posts:

1. The Conservative Party Website
2. The Liberal Democrat Party Website
3. Who Wins the Accessibility Election?
4. Summary- Accessibility Election
5. Postscript to 3 Party Websites

Tags: disability accessibility, government, html, Labour Party, S3 Web Design, Search Engine Optimisation, visitors, website