Prompts in Practice: Assessing Election Website Accessibility

Putting the web accessibility audit checklist to practice

In our previous post, we used Claude to generate a website accessibility checklist using federal web accessibility technical guidelines. Our goal is to use the checklist to perform a web accessibility audit, and identify vulnerabilities on election websites that increase information barriers for voters with disabilities.

For this task, we use New Jersey’s Voter Information Portal as a test case. This test case will help evaluate the effectiveness of using AI-generated checklists for auditing websites and demonstrate how election offices can run their own web accessibility audits.

First, we saved the website we want to audit to a local drive as an HTML file (Ctr + S; Save as Website, Complete). Then, we uploaded the HTML file, along with the PDF of the checklist we had previously generated into ChatGPT (free version). We also made sure to include an instruction in the prompt to format the output according to the checklist to make sure the output is as concise and readable as possible.

Prompts in Practice

Use Case / Purpose

Use an AI-generated WCAG web accessibility compliance checklist to audit website content accessibility and demonstrate its effectiveness for election offices

Audience

Election officials who want to assess whether their website meets accessibility requirements

Timing

Ongoing

Sources

• New Jersey Voter Information Portal

• WCAG Checklist

AI Tool Used

ChatGPT (Free Version)

Prompt

The webpage file provided links to New Jersey’s official voter information portal. The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) prevents discrimination on the basis of disability and requires that official government resources are accessible to those with disabilities. Please use the attached WCAG checklist to comb through this website to assess accessibility. Format your response as a filled out reproduction of the checklist template.

Output

Below is a snippet of the output.

ChatGPT generated a summary table with three categories for the audit results: ✓ for successful compliance, ✗ to flag for potential issues with compliance, and N/A for fields that were not present on the website.

AI Use Safety Signal

🟡 Caution

This prompt requires some minor technical ability to ensure accuracy. For example, when we uploaded the website as a “Website, HTML Only” file (instead of Website, Complete) ChatGPT identified more accessibility violations than when we uploaded the website file saved as a complete webpage. Therefore, it is especially important to manually verify accuracy of the output. The checklist is meant to streamline the manual auditing process, not replace it.