Accessibility and Performance Review of the Kirsten Gillibrand for President 2020 Website

This is one in a series of posts that will look at the performance and #a11y metrics of the websites for the currently declared 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. Yeah, all of them! For more background on what I’m doing and how I’m doing it check read this.

Homepage of kirstengillibrand.com

kirstengillibrand.com

Google Lighthouse

Lighthouse scores for kirstengillibrand.com

Performance: 79 out of 100

Time to interactive is 5.3 seconds. I believe this is due to a cookied donation modal check that runs before the rest of the page is rendered. The page is pretty heavy with images that could be optimized further.

Accessibility: 95 out of 100

  • No contrast issues found with any text and tabbing via keyboard displays focus rings on interactive elements.
  • User scaling is disabled. This prevents a user from zooming in on a page if they have difficulty reading text. Apple’s iOS and Safari no longer support this attribute anyways since it is considered harmful to a user, and it should be removed from the code.

Best Practices: 86 out of 100

Lots of external links that open in a new window without the rel=”noopener” attribute present.

SEO: 100 out of 100

No issues found.

Network

  • HTTPS: yes
  • 51 Requests
  • 4.5 MB resources
  • Largest asset is a 905 KB jpg used for the page background. That many

Platform

  • WordPress, custom theme.

Notes

The theme has dropped support for older versions of Internet Explorer, removing the outdated lt-ie7, lt-ie8, etc. classes found in old versions of HTML5 bootstrap. I still see plenty of sites use this code but I would put good money on no one is browsing your site on those old browsers anymore.