BBC | Access 2.0

Sort it indeed

By Paul Crichton
30 Nov 06, 08:46 AM

All I can say is that it is a good job that young disabled people don’t get into debt. If they did, they might be sorely disappointed should they visit the new Conservative website, sort it, for help and information about combating their “inner tosser”.

Putting to one side much of the contentious stuff about how the message is delivered (even though it did make me feel like an old tosser) I must say I was disappointed by the level of accessibility provided.

Looking at the access statement it’s hard to see what level of accessibility they are hoping to meet – which didn’t help me. Yes, it is clear that the designers have thought about it. There are access keys and you can change the size of the text. But there are niggly things like a failure to highlight links when tabbing through them and not using heading tags properly.

But what really annoyed me was that the interactive, funky parts of the site designed to encourage the kids of today to think about their spending habits lack any kind of accessibility features. There is a test delivered in Flash, and despite the accessibility features available for Flash today, none are implemented. Text is of a fixed size, and you can’t navigate with just the keyboard. It isn’t screen reader friendly either. Then there is the much talked about video that has no closed captioning or transcript. While information is available beyond the video and test, that is no excuse – if they didn’t add value to the website, they wouldn’t be there at all.

I have to say, I’m impressed with what the Conservatives are trying to do. Why wait until they are in power to try an affect change - why not try to do something and help people now? It is just a shame that they have failed to extend this help to everyone.

The biggest factor behind my disappointment is that I know that Government websites are expected to provide high levels of accessibility. And whilst I understand the difference between Government and political parties, I expected the major parties to provide similar standards.

I also visited the Labour Party website and watched the party political broadcast featuring the chameleon – and no transcript or captioning was available there either.

If we can’t expect decent levels of accessibility from political parties, where can we expect to find it?