The Daily Sucker

Submitter’s comments: I know taking a shot a government sites is like shooting fish in a barrel, but this deserves to be held up to public ridicule. The page is distracting and annoying to read. It seems the concept of “good enough for gov’ment work” is alive and well. And this is just one page in a dizzying array of pure badness on this site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Oh, God. This is the instruction page for a U.S. Trademark/Service Mark Application. One of the areas I didn’t cover in my article Does My Web Site Suck? Checklist 1 is the topic of forms. Well, you can see why I avoided the topic. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

Like every third web site, the lack of contrast is a problem. I ran the home page through AccessColor and got the following report:

Report summary

The W3C recommends a standard of 500 or greater for the color difference and a standard of 125 or greater for color brightness.

Based on these considerations, the results for this page are:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 12.21% of the total text.

   A Fail message is displayed next to the HTML source line.

2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 1.56% of the total the text.

   A Warning message is displayed next to the HTML source line.

Both color difference and color brightness fail

Gee, I thought government web sites had to be accessible to folks with vision impairments.

Trademark/Service Mark Application, Principal Register