With the issuing of the main party manifestos the elections in
the UK are now in full swing.
With catch phrases like:
- A Future Fair for All (Labour)
- 4 Steps to a Fairer Britain (Lib Dems)
- We are all in this together (Conservatives)
You could be lead to believe that inclusivity was important to
all the parties and that would include fair access for people
with disabilities. What better way to show this than by creating
accessible manifestos which could be retrieved and then access by
anyone whatever their level of disability.
So I thought I would look at the manifestos of the major parties,
if I have time I will extend this review to other parties.
So in alphabetic order:
Conservatives
The manifesto page on the
website clearly states that the manifesto is available in
alternate formats and the audio version is available in
downloadable chunks on this page.
There are two versions of the PDF one of which is much bigger
than the other (3 MB v 77MB) but there is no explanation what the
difference is besides the size (judging by the file name the
bigger one is a higher resolution which is only relevant if you
want to print it out on a quality printer).
The problem with both of the PDFs is that they are not tagged or
bookmarked so they are not fully accessible.
Labour
The manifesto page
does not include any information about alternative formats and
does not give any information about the size nor the format of
the downloadable version (it is 1.4MB PDF).
The PDF has bookmarks for the chapter headings and it is tagged.
Unfortunately the tags are little use as they do not describe the
structure of the document. The bookmark for the chapter on Growth
does not work and worse still all the content of this chapter is
not in the structure tree so does not get read out by the Read
Out Loud function.
Lib Dems
The manifesto page
does point to alternative formats if you look carefully ('More
versions' is not such an obvious heading as 'Alternative
formats') and the PDF versions are defined as such but the size
is not given (it is 0.9MB).
The PDF version is not tagged or bookmarked.
The Result
None of them get it right but:
- Conservatives have the most complete and most easily found
set of alternate formats. Shame that the PDF is not up to
scratch.
- Lib Dem with alternative formats available if not obviously.
- Labour do not have any available accessible formats. It seems
that a technician had some understanding of accessibility but did
not know how to put it into action.
