When Bruce Howell, who coordinates accessibility services for the Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, visited the newly-redesigned Boston.gov website, he mostly liked what he found.

Howell, like many blind people, uses screen-reading software to access the web.

The software, operated entirely by keyboard command, can not only read the text a visual user would see on the screen, but can organize the website in different ways—by headings, for example, or as a list of links. Using his screen reading software, Howell can scroll through these elements quickly—incredibly quickly. Blind and visually impaired people, he says, can use a website as quickly as anyone else—if it’s accessible.

Last week, the city of Boston unveiled a major redesign of its website, overhauling some 20,000 pages of content. The site now runs on open-source software called Drupal, allowing the city to benefit from (free) crowdsourced updates and expertise. And the site goes a long way toward streamlining information from different departments around common resident needs: moving to the city, owning a car, paying bills and tickets. It's a big improvement in streamlining municipal information. (See five top features at the end of this story.)

Also central to this redesign is accessibility—to non-English speakers, to readers with lower levels of reading comprehension, to users accessing city services primarily by mobile devices, and to users with disabilities, including users who are blind or visually-impaired. 

But it’s unclear exactly how well the new website serves those users—partly because the city has not commissioned a third-party audit commonly used to measure accessibility.

In order to help evaluate how well the site worked for blind users, WGBH News asked Howell for a first-take evaluation.

Overall, he said, “This is a pretty good page—the site is good, compared to many.”

For the most part the site uses headings and subheadings that are organized for efficient browsing with a screen reader; links and images are tied to text that explains what they represent.

But Howell did find some basic flaws. 

As he navigated the website’s front page, link by link, he came across a few links that read, through the screen reader, only as “Send an email,” “Send an email.”

Looking at the page, it made sense: The links were below pictures of City Council members. But the text embedded in the link—text which developers can make detailed as they want—said only “Send an email.”

“I can’t tell whether the send an email link is below the person’s name or above the person’s name,” Howell explained. “By just adding the name of the person to the link label, it would be totally clear—so that’s a little bit of an accessibility issue right there.”

The most significant flaw Howell found involved a search button, a little magnifying glass in the upper right corner of the website.

“What we discovered is that with a screen reader, I can’t even get to that magnifying glass icon,” Howell said. “So for me, as a blind user, the search function doesn’t exist on this website.” 

And that, says Howell, means that function is not accessible.

“There’s no question about it—because it’s allowing you to do something visually that I can’t do at all, nonvisually,” he said.

We reached out to the city with Howell’s findings and Chief Digital Officer Lauren Lockwood responded with a thank-you to Howell.

“Those [findings] are terrific,” Lockwood told WGBH News. “It’s really hard for me to assess the website from the point of view of someone who’s vision impaired and I know that, our team knows that.”

Lockwood says that the city did utilize the aid of blind or visually impaired volunteers, as well as automated tests, to check the website, but said that the city had not gotten a formal “accessibility audit”—the same kind of service that Howell and the Carroll Center for the Blind provide, primarily because of the cost.

This news surprised Howell, who noted that colleges, companies and municipalities are frequently required to conduct such audits in settlements with the U.S. Department of Justice, which enforces accessibility.

The city doesn’t have immediate plans for an accessibility audit, Lockwood said, but officials are considering the idea.

Her team meanwhile has been alerted to the issues Howell identified and is working to fix them.