The most disappointing current problem is that headings are so badly used and so important to screen reader users.

Let’s save the U.S. a few $k and follow Marco’s advice using screen reader NVDA in the FireFox browser to reveal some heading, list, and dynamic content problems.

As an avid Obama supporter, I have struggled to get the campaign, and now the administration to address accessibility for over two years. The responses have been disappointing. Up until the item I just put on my web site – all those efforts have been private. I am finding that there has been quite a bit of discussion – and there should be more.

Oh and then there is recovery.gov – as you mention in your last comment – they have incredible problems. I am planning on working on that in the next few days. If you send me an email address (through my contact form, http://jimthatcher.com/contact.htm) – I would be glad to forward a detailed report on whitehouse.gov that I have tried to get through to the people responsible for the White House web site.

The pie chart ALT is nonsensical, navigation is awkward, and the underlying javascript code is irregular. However, the site has potential and looks pretty good, they say.

Come on, Obama team. Let’s get the best and the brightest up there to D.C. to get these front page websites on track for citizens with vision problems. These sites should be models for the rest of the government in not only style but usability.

…

http://blogger.ceoxi.com/2009/02/whitehousegov-redesign-change-
has-come.html

The blogger also points out other accessibility issues like unconventional search box positioning. disagreeing with the observation about the bottom navigation table, this was easy to find for me and has, or had, a skip link at the top.

Nice phrase: “change we can validate”!!

I am still befuddled by the Heading outline of the main page. It jumps around phrases like “Peril” to “search” and “blog” . I just cannot envision the underlying logic of the page although I can understand each of the parts when I get there. On the Disabilities page, the heading order read by my screen reader is H3, H2,H4 so I’m a bit confused at levels within the agenda.

Last week I skipped over some mystery 1, 2, 3, 4 reading. This time I poked around more and discovered these bring up a short description of a feature above the boxes. But this dynamic content is not notified to my screen reader. Similar patterns of web design using this tricky interaction of web page with browser read by screen reader could cause great confusion if the content is really important. Right now, the numbers and features are just a bit of glitch in the way of accessibility.

I subscribed to blog feeds on my Levelstar Icon PDA but nothing has come through. I need to check whether this is a non-standard feed that is not added properly to my RSS client.

Just guessing when revisiting the comment page, that required fields are marked by asterisk. But I have punctuation speaking turned off in the screen reader so miss such a notification. As observed in another critique, the form lacks labels where the word Required or Optional might be spoken. This is pretty rudimentary accessibility practice covered in standards. Shame!

The w3 Semantic Data Extractor link above produces the error message:

Using org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser
Exception net.sf.saxon.trans.DynamicError: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The entity name must immediately follow the ‘&’ in the entity reference.
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The entity name must immediately follow the ‘&’ in the entity
reference.

This might be a minor syntax error on the whitehouse.gov home page or a flaw in the validator. More later on whether other validators work. Also see the very interesting comment comparing whitehouse.gov with the British PM website.

http://terrillthompson.com/2009/01/contacting-whitehouse-with-screen.html

Another observation is the failure to provide sufficient focus support for using whitehouse.gov without a mouse.

Note: the flaws we are pointing out are not esoterica but rather well documented in web standards and accessibility blogs such as http://webaxe.blogspot.com (WebAxe).

On accessibility, Wave reported 5 errors for the Whitehouse page & 1 for Number10, though conceivably Number10’s is “worse” (it’s no field label for the search field for the whole site, where the Whitehouse missing ones are alt tags to photo libraries; so, potentially less useful to someone using a screen reader than the site search. Not that you’d know that – you’d just know it was a mystery link)

Number 10 also has links to sites like YouTube, which , as others have pointed out, isn’t as accessible as it could be (though they have now got the option to have captioned videos, so getting better)

Guess both need to pull up their socks