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.
Google Lighthouse
Performance: 21 out of 100
I came in to this review with the assumption that the darling of the Silicon Valley crowd would have quite the website. Either it would be extremely well optimized or run like shit, and here we are. 34.7 seconds Time to interactive. A double digit megabyte front-end. Woof! But it does come with this cheesy bouncing Yang fundraising counter:
Accessibility: 63 out of 100
- No labels for form inputs
- Text contrast issues
- No alt attributes on images
- Links with no discernible name, using only an image with no alt text.
- The :focus styling uses a custom 1 pixel outline, so someone was obviously paying attention to the design details but didn’t even try to take care of these glaring accessibility issues.
Best Practices: 79 out of 100
External links that open in a new window without the rel=”noopener” attribute present.
Images are much larger than they need to be. For example, the logo at the top of the page is a 1,775 x 433 pixel png, but displayed at 271 x 66. Just running this single image through an optimizer such as ImageOptim would save 50% of the file size. Better yet, they could use an svg.
SEO: 92 out of 100
Links without descriptive text that simply say “Learn More”
Network
- HTTPS: yes
- 108 Requests
- 16.6 MB resources
- Largest asset is a nearly 2.3 MB png which has no transparency. A high quality jpg replacement would save so much of the user’s bandwidth. for the page background.
Platform
- WordPress, Aspire Pro (paid) theme.
Notes
So far this is the most sizable candidate website I’ve reviewed. Little effort has been made to optimize the images for a speedy download. Does Yang’s proposed universal basic income cover expensive mobile data plans?