aclu: the content report
This week, I planned and executed a content audit and analysis for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) website and its other social platforms. Read the full report on the ACLU website here, or keep scrolling for the major findings.
What do they do?
The ACLU fights for human rights across the United States, including litigation, lobbying, and education. It supports a wide variety of topics, from capital punishment, to immigrants' rights, to racial justice and voting rights. It holds classes on organizing and human rights topics, files court cases, and advocates for laws and policies that support human rights.
The ACLU gives volunteers ideas on how to organize and help their own communities. It also offers advice and various resources on what to do about personal human rights violations, and reports often on human rights violations, ongoing court cases, and other updates in the field. The audience is young to middle-aged leftist activists, seeking to fulfill their need for compassion, interdependence, and community.
Titles & descriptions
The site has a great deal of blogs and articles on topics like court cases and human rights violations or protections across the United States. The title lengths range from 22 to 189 characters, and are very descriptive, typically referring to the specific cause, story, or court case being written about.
The site uses a wide variety of text in the meta descriptions, but tends to make them way too long. Over 45% of the descriptions are over 155 characters (the standard maximum for responsive meta descriptions) and some are well over 1,000 words- much too unwieldy to actually use, especially on mobile devices.
Images and accessibility
Using the WAVE Web Accessibility tool, I evaluated the ACLU website and found a handful of issues. Its forms are difficult to process with a screen reader, since fields sometimes have multiple title tags attached, and WAVE deemed the contrast on some images and text to be too low. For the most part, though, the website is doing well in accessibility.
Most of the images on the ACLU website have <alt> tags, which are blocks of descriptive text in HTML that allow a viewer to understand images without needing sight. Much like their titles, these alt tags tend to run a little long, and vary in quality. Some are brief and direct, some have excessive description, and still others don't describe the actual image whatsoever.
Writing
The writing and overall “voice” is very strong. The ACLU commits to its direct tone, never shying away from difficult topics or relying on euphemisms to dance around a point. The content is factual yet passionate, and driven by a strong leftist perspective, much like its audience.
Architecture
The site is responsive, and works well in any device format: whether PC, tablet, or mobile device. The navigation is a simple horizontal layout, but the collapsible submenus expand into a long list of subheadings that seem unnecessary.
Currently, menu items like ‘About’ and ‘Issues’ aren’t clickable, and instead only expand into a confusing extra layout. Either organizing these into fewer subgroups or leading to a simple, searchable layout would solve this problem relatively quickly. Compounding this issue is the lack of a search function.
As for the rest of the page, the content is well-organized and varied without being confusing. Links, tags, and buttons are easy to read, and nothing is too overwhelming.
