Evaluating Accessibility on Congressional Websites
Partner:Emma Lurie, School of Information, UC Berkeley, Academic
Overview
Project Description
Voters and constituents increasingly look to the websites of elected officials to answer their questions about voting or constituent services. Recent work has discovered that many of the leading presidential candidates’ websites are not accessible to vision impaired users. This project aims to discover the breadth and depth of accessibility issues on congressional representatives’ websites. Discovery students will be responsible for developing a data collection framework using existing accessibility APIs and then analyzing the accessibility of congressional and election websites using primarily descriptive statistics. The final deliverables of the project will be a written report and accessible web application.
Expected Deliverable
The student team will be responsible for producing a written report as well as a web app. The report will outline their methodology, findings, analysis, and suggestions for future work. Meaningful visualizations (maps, charts, etc.) will be an important part of the report.
Students will also be asked to create an accessible web app that will help other researchers and stakeholders engage with our findings. This should also be a good addition to students’ portfolios.
What would a successful semester look like to you?
A successful semester would have students deepening their data science skills and broadening their understanding of how to leverage data science to make social change. Students will meet weekly with a PhD student to provide updates and ask for technical or methodological guidance and communicate as needed on a Slack workspace. By the mid-point of the semester, the team should have concluded with data collection and be well into analyzing the data. By the end of the semester, the team should have produced the final report and created a prototype of the accessible web app.
Additional Skills from ideal candidates
Students with an interest or experience in web accessibility are especially encouraged to apply.
Data
Models
Conclusion