The Liberal Democrat Party Website
Of all of the sites I have looked at the Liberal Democrat website annoys me the most.
This article is the third in a number of articles regarding the main UK political parties and their websites with a particular focus on accessibility, looking at the reality of what the UK political parties actually do compared to their stated policies.
I wanted to look at just how responsibly each major political party carries out its own policies with regard to accessibility and just how careful they are about complying generally with the accepted rules of accessibility and the internet generally. After all, we want a government that is honest and transparent don’t we?
I have in earlier articles looked at both the Labour Party website and the Conservative Party website. Of all three parties The Liberal Democrat Party website has the least written on their site with regard to accessibility. They say;
This Web site has been produced with a view to being accessible by all people, with varying abilities, viewing the site via numerous electronic devices.
Influenced by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as recommended by W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative, the site, both in respect to design and construction, aims to deliver content that is easy and consistent to navigate as well as being readily accessible to as broad an audience as possible.
These statements pay lip service to the requirements for accessibility and, believe me, I do not just mean accessibility for those with any form of disability. The website has been set up with a “splash” page which, apart from being incredibly outdated, messes with the website incredibly. The home page has a 302 redirect on it which meant that, no matter how I tried, I could not check the validation of the home page so my comments below are based on an inner page, namely “What We Stand For” and therefore I cannot, necessarily, make a direct comparison with the other 2 main political parties.
I am sure that the Lib Dems would love to perform better in elections, so why is it they ignore the large proportion of the electorate with impaired vision? And, by this, I do not mean just those registered with a disability I mean people like me in their forties where age can cause quite a few problems with sight. I say this because the Liberal Democrat website fails dreadfully with regard to colour and accessibility; it has 5 FAILS and 57 warnings with respect to use of colour on just one page (“What We Stand For”). Text on a web page has to be sufficiently bright and different to the background colour to enable it to be easily read. Do remember this is only a quick check, if indeed text has been placed over graphics then this test will not have picked up on those errors.
As mentioned in my earlier articles “alt text” for images is very important when it comes to screen readers for the visually impaired and indeed for search engines. Neither screen readers nor search engines can read images. Again, the Liberal Democrat website performed worst in this area. Of the 17 image tags on this page only 7 had the alt attribute filled in. Strangely, a W3C test for coding quality shows the page as error free despite the missing alt text however the website only appears to be HTML compliant because EMPTY alt tags have been written in the code. So what you see, ie apparently fully valid code, is not what you get, ie empty alt tags; an empty promise of no use to a person with a sight impairment using a screen reader.
The 404 headers are also wrongly constructed and although there is a main header h1 tag, it looks as if this has been placed well off the screen using the -9999px trick favoured by graphic designers. However Matt Cutts of Google, in a video in June 09, made it quite clear that this was bad practice as anything not viewable by the website visitor is hidden text and was viewed as such by the Google algorithm and penalised. Hidden text is, in essence, deceitful and not acceptable.
Transparency and clarity are vital for a government of this country as is trustworthiness otherwise why will the electorate vote for any particular party. It seems fair therefore that if the Lib Dems say on their website;
Influenced by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as recommended by W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative, the site, both in respect to design and construction, aims to deliver content that is easy and consistent to navigate as well as being readily accessible to as broad an audience as possible.
that we should be able to expect their website to comply with the guidelines. Why then is it then that this page has 1 WCAG error and 10 warnings? Plus 2 link errors.
Additionally from an SEO point of view the text to code ratio is only 15.43%, which is better than the other 2 parties but still not very high and, as I said above, this analysis is not for the home page unlike for the other 2 parties. I suspect that the home page would have a lower text to code ratio. Also the Liberal Democrats have not bothered with any meta description for their website pages which is just lazy.
I have no political affiliations and hope my analyses brief as they are have given you food for thought.
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:
- The Labour Party Website
- The Conservative Party Website
- Who Wins the Accessibility Election?
- Postscript to 3 Party Websites
- Summary- Accessibility Election
Tags: disability accessibility, Google, Liberal Democrat, matt cutts, meta tags, S3 Web Design, website