Dr. Carolyn Bennett: There’s a perfectly functional, content-rich web site here; unfortunately, it’s buried several layers inside an interface that makes a serious usability mistake.
Once you click past the English/Français splash screen, you arrive at an attractive photo of Dr. Bennett’s desk, with a large agenda book open in front of you. You navigate by clicking on entries in the address book. But if you’re visually impaired (or surfing on a slow dial-up connection), you have a problem… because the copy on that home page and on most of the pages it links to is done entirely as graphics; unless you can actually see the image, you have no idea what the text says. It’s an approach that puts design ahead of accessibility. The one saving grace would have been the use of “alt” attributes (a piece of code which provides a text-based alternative to an image), but the site’s designer hasn’t added them yet. (Here’s hoping they do.)
Several layers down is the actual site, which uses a clean, easily-navigated design (and recapitulates the content of what they call the “photo site”). It includes a blog (but, unfortunately, no feeds or reader comments), a list of e-mail contacts for the campaign, an e-newsletter, a newsroom (again, no feeds) and more. There’s a page promising a wide-ranging policy discussion, but no interactivity yet, apart from a form for anyone who wants to attend a “democracy dinner”; that section could use some of the online engagement that the social web can do so well.
Dr. Bennett’s site has potential, but it’s an example of how focusing on design at the expense of access can undermine a site’s success.
