How accessible are U.S. Senate 2024 candidate websites?
Introduction
How can candidates for public office demonstrate a commitment to equal opportunity, beyond mere lip service? One way is to adhere to website accessibility standards. These standards help people browse the web despite obstacles such as difficult environments, cognitive or physical disability, and age-related impairments.
This year 33 states are electing U.S. senators. According to Ballotpedia, 92 Senate candidates are on the ballot and have campaign websites. On 18 September 2024 I ran automated accessibility tests on the candidates’ home pages, using open-source testing and scoring tools described in my blog entry How to run a thousand accessibility tests
.
As part of the test reporting, each page received an aggregate score. The ideal score (no definitive or even suspected faults) would be 0; higher scores are worse. To make this clear, I call them deficit scores
.
Results
Here are the scores of the 92 candidates. The candidates are sorted so that the best (lowest) score appears at the top of the table and the worst (highest) score at the bottom.
Each candidate identifier in the first column is also a link to the campaign home page that was tested for accessibility, so you can visit it yourself.
Each score in the second column is a link to a detailed report on the results of the testing of that page. The report explains how the score was computed and, more importantly, details the complaints by the tools about the page, allowing a web developer to evaluate and address the complaints.
Are the scores credible?
I performed about a thousand tests, from eleven different tools, on each page. The tools come from universities (including Princeton, Lisbon, and Utah State), an industry organization (the World Wide Web Consortium), and companies (IBM, Deque, Siteimprove, Squiz Labs, Wally, CVS Health, and eSSENTIAL Accessibility).
No accessibility testing system, whether automated or human, is completely objective and error-free. Not only can tools and human testers make mistakes, but experts and end users have diverse opinions about the criteria for rating accessibility. The automated tests I conducted have the advantage of not being biased by the party or candidate preferences of human testers, but it would be hubris to claim that any automated system is neutral.
A case in point
To investigate any score, to check on suspicious tests, or to understand how to make a page more accessible, you can examine its detailed report. A good report to start with is the one reporting the worst score: on the home page of Nella Domenici, the Republican candidate in New Mexico.
The page benefits from some deliberate accessibility features, including a version in Spanish and visible indicators to facilitate navigation without a mouse. It misses other features that accessibility standards require, such as classifying form inputs to help users enter Last Name
and other standard facts more easily. The tests reported more than eighty accessibility issues on the page. But the page got its disastrous score mainly by containing technical errors that made a web browser pour out a deluge of complaints. During the testing of this page, the browser issued about 130 thousand error notices! Just keeping the page open on my MacBook Pro makes the computer cooling fan race as the browser keeps spitting out warnings.
The Domenici page was made with the Wix website builder, which in turn makes use of the React library. Ideally, a website builder helps you prevent technical errors, and Wix claims to help with accessibility, too. It says, Our Wizard quickly scans your site to pinpoint accessibility issues and gives you a step-by-step guide to make your website accessible to all.
Whether Wix failed on this page or the site creator misused Wix, the result was a page with dozens of reported accessibility flaws and pathological browser interaction.
Biggest issues
In total, the tests reported 243 issues. I use the term issue
to describe a type of problem. For any issue, a page can have many instances
of that issue. The three issues that cost pages the most in deficit scores were:
- Invalid styles: The page violates the standard rules for defining color, font size, and other styles.
- Contrast between foreground and background: The page contains text or shapes that are difficult to distinguish from the surrounding content, such as white text on a light gray or multicolored background.
- Multiple main headings: The page has more than one
h1heading, violating the principle that each page should have a single main heading to tell you what the page is about.
Some users, especially users who are blind, depend on software to help them navigate through a site and within each page by means of invisibly coded headings. But one candidate’s home page has twenty h1 headings instead of only one. It also codes the items in the candidate’s platform with h4 headings, although they are not headings at all. This prevents user software from providing heading-based navigation help.
Conclusion
Website accessibility standards can help any website, including a campaign website, promote equal opportunity and efficient navigation. For candidates seeking federal office, adhering to these standards may also reassure voters that the candidates:
- know how to choose competent personnel to perform complex tasks
- think and care about reaching a diverse audience
- could participate (as the Senate has recently done) in the revision and enforcement of federal laws that require the government’s own websites to be accessible
Assuming my testing and scoring are valid, the home pages of the candidates for the United States Senate in the 2024 general election vary greatly in their adherence to accessibility standards. Perusal of the table will show some association between political party and score. On average, the home pages of candidates who do not belong to a major party have the best accessibility scores. Between the two major parties, the Republican home pages have scores that average 28% worse than the Democratic pages. But the variation is much greater within than across parties. The worst Democratic score is 512% worse than the best Democratic score, and the worst Republican score is 906% worse than the best Republican score. Thus, the candidates, not their parties, are determining the success or failure of their websites in providing an accessible visitor experience.