It’s Election Day, and every party is asking for your vote. So we checked whether their websites let everyone in. Virgil and Cole reviewed the national DNC, RNC and Green Party websites for accessibility and usability, and did their best to leave the politics out of it.
The idea behind the episode is simple. A party that wants every vote should have a website that every voter can use, whether they’re on a phone, using a screen reader, or just trying to find out what the party stands for. None of the three gets a clean bill of health. Each one falls short in its own way, whether that’s a site that mostly follows the rules but still gets in your way, a site built to push you toward one action, or a site nobody seems to have looked after in years.
What the sites prioritize says a lot. These are organizations with real budgets, and their websites work more like donation funnels than introductions. The ask for money is front and center, while the information about who they are and what they believe is harder to find, and harder for some people to use at all.
Virgil also wonders how much of this comes from organizations working in a constant scramble, pushing changes live in a hurry with nobody checking what they break. That isn’t unique to politics. Plenty of organizations run their websites the same way.
Virgil and Cole also disagree on whether a smaller budget excuses an inaccessible site, and Virgil makes the case that free tools leave little room for excuses. They close with the first thing they’d fix on each site, and most of the fixes come down to basic attention to detail.
(0:00) - Intro
(1:45) - Today's topic: Political websites, critiqued
(3:30) - Built for donations, not voters
(4:52) - The pop-ups you hit first
(6:04) - How the three sites scored
(7:22) - Why big-budget sites still fail
(11:13) - The worst offense on each site
(13:16) - Should the Green Party get a pass?
(15:10) - None of these sites are innocent
(18:18) - What we would fix on each site
(21:52) - Closing thoughts
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