The European People’s Party (EPP) website has significant accessibility challenges across multiple domains. Issues found risk excluding users with visual, cognitive and motor impairments.

The most severe problems found mostly affect users with cognitive impairments or even users who are not tech-savvy. There is content that continuously changes without any chance for the user to pause, which may be highly difficult to cope with for any user. There is a lack of clear error messages and error indications, which makes it difficult for users to succeed in filling in forms.

Blind users who rely on assistive technology risk being completely or partly excluded from content because of issues with keyboard navigation. This issue is compounded by a a lack of alternative descriptions on elements like links and images, which is needed for these users to receive the information as audio or Braille.

On mobile, the menu is not accessible via any assistive technology.

Users with motor impairments with and without assistive technology may face important barriers because of the malfunctioning keyboard navigation. Even more serious, the party – or the service provider contracted by them – has deliberately removed the built-in visual keyboard focus of standard browsers, making it extremely hard for users of assistive technology to navigate.

Low-vision users may find the website difficult to handle because of low contrast and information that is dependent on the perception of colour, making it hard or impossible to reach and understand some content.

Positively, hard-of-hearing users are supported by auto-captioned video.

The documents are not accessible.

“The EPP website has a constantly playing video in the large banner in the top of the top of the start page. The users cannot pause the video. To make things worse, the main menu is placed on top of the video, making the text extremely hard to read.”