Access Denied – a democratic issue

European elections are coming up in 1,5 months. But the European parties’ websites are excluding people with disabilities from essential information. Together with the European Disability Forum, we have investigated the status of accessibility, and it is not a pretty sight.

Spot-checks on seven European Parties’ websites are revealing severe accessibility issues affecting many user groups. Not only are the websites bad, they are extremely bad. How did this happen?
Without actually knowing the story behind, an educated guess leads to the following interpretation: no one has thought about accessibility here.

The websites have basic technical issues most probably emanating from bad procurement decisions when selecting authoring tools, lack of clear requirements when contracting suppliers or a combination of both. The graphical design issues as well as UX-design problems would have been easy to avoid if user testing had been performed during the production phase. Content-related mistakes indicate that web authors lack basic training and/or that the authoring environment doesn’t allow them to publish in an accessible way.

Citizens need to understand what parties want to achieve in order to vote for them. Therefore, political parties need to communicate with as many as possible. The low level of accessibility on the websites – some of the issues being the worst we have ever measured – seems to indicate that 15-20% of the population is not relevant for the parties.

This is nothing less than a disgrace.

Report on (in)accessibility of European Political Party websites

Contact

Malin Hammarberg
malin.hammarberg@stiftelsenfunka.org

André Félix
andre.felix@edf-feph.org