Election 2003: Fully Inclusive?

Disabled web users are being prevented from accessing the web sites and online manifestos of Scotland's main political parties because such sites fall seriously short of basic accessibility guidelines, a new study has revealed.

The review, carried out by the University of Dundee's Digital Media Access Group and commercial law firm Brodies, examined the sites of each main political party standing in the 2003 Scottish Parliament Elections to find out how accessible they would be to disabled web users.

A selection of key accessible web design guidelines were used to gauge how accessible manifesto information would be to people who are blind, visually impaired, deaf, cognitively impaired, motor-impaired or have dyslexia. The study revealed that most party sites would present serious accessibility problems to some disabled users. Many sites, including those of Scottish Labour and Scottish Conservatives failed to follow basic accessibility guidelines - guidelines which have been in existence as long as the Scottish Parliament itself. Martin Sloan of Brodies said: "Recent legislation such as the Representation of the People Act 2000 has forced the physical process of voting at elections in the UK to be made more accessible to disabled people. This review shows, however, that despite the Disablity Discrimination Act 1995 requiring website providers to make their sites accessible it is clearly still very difficult for many disabled voters to be able to access information to allow them to make an informed choice when voting."

David Sloan of the Digital Media Access Group said, "The World Wide Web provides an excellent opportunity for information to be provided in an accessible form, regardless of a person's specific disability. Unfortunately, it seems that most Scottish political parties have yet to grasp the potential of the Web as a way of effectively reaching out to the widest possible audience."

Election 2003: Fully Inclusive? An Investigation into the Accessibility of Web based Manifesto information of parties standing in the Scottish Parliament Elections 2003.

Specific findings:

• It would take someone unable to use a mouse nearly 30 key presses to be able to access the Scottish Liberal Democrat manifesto, nearly 80 key presses to access the Scottish Labour manifesto, and access to the Peoples' Alliance manifesto would be impossible for someone who could not use a mouse.
• Due to the layout of sites and a frequent lack of text alternatives to graphics, navigating to the manifestos of most parties would be extremely frustrating and time consuming for blind web users, who browse using text-to-speech technology.
• The SNP did provide a separate version of their web site and manifesto, which in theory were more accessible than the main versions. However, access from the accessible site to the accessible manifesto was not possible, limiting the use of these versions.
• The Scottish Labour site included a 'Disability Access' statement, indicating that the needs of disabled users had been taken into account during the site design, yet the site fared very poorly when reviewed against accessibility guidelines.
• The Scottish Socialist Party's site was the most accessible, and allowed access to the manifesto without significant difficulty.

A full version of this report can be found at http://www.dmag.org.uk/election/ The Digital Media Access Group was founded at the University of Dundee's Department of Applied Computing in 1998. The group is an expert accessibility consultancy with a mission to promote the design of accessible and usable Web sites and other digital information.

Brodies is one of Scotland's leading commercial law firms with 36 partners based in Edinburgh. Brodies Technology Group advises in the areas of Internet advice, technology procurement, data protection, intellectual property, media and franchising.

For further information, contact:
David Sloan: 01382 541657, mobile 07870 296 477, 01382 345598 dsloan@computing.dundee.ac.uk
Martin Sloan: 07974 655170 martin.sloan@brodies.co.uk

By Jane Smernicki, Press Officer 01382 344768 j.m.smernicki@dundee.ac.uk