New feature today. I’m looking at different campaign websites and noting some violations of accessibility guidelines. First off, due to the attention she’s getting is Senator Hillary Clinton’s page announcing her new campaign theme song. Go to the page and you are presented right off the bat with the music playing. There is no way to stop the music.
This flies in the face of the best practice which is to not auto-start any multimedia. There are many instances where this will create negative user experiences. Those (like me) who listen to music while browsing are going to experience a cacophony of blended music and sound and will have no way of ending the audio barrage except to leave Clinton’s page. That’s not the best way to guide users into your site.
The WCAG 2 draft has a guideline that best applies with auto-starting this kind of material, Guideline 2.2:
Guideline 2.2 Provide users with disabilities enough time to read and use content.
Next, try viewing the page without images. It’s pretty sad.
How is that supposed to work for someone who can’t see? This violates the first of the WCAG 1 Priority One guidelines:
1.1 Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via “alt”, “longdesc”, or in element content). This includes: images, graphical representations of text (including symbols), image map regions, animations (e.g., animated GIFs), applets and programmatic objects, ascii art, frames, scripts, images used as list bullets, spacers, graphical buttons, sounds (played with or without user interaction), stand-alone audio files, audio tracks of video, and video.
We are too far along in developing and designing web pages for this sort of high-visibility site to feature such a hindrance to accessibility, not to mention usability. Senator Clinton and/or her staff need to revisit the web site. (Or pay a better designer to work on the site. This is simply bad.)
That a presidential candidate has a website built to HTML4 specs is pretty bad. That the site relies on images without alt tags is damning.
