I never thought I'd write a piece criticising Taylor Swift. I've been a devoted fan since becoming enraptured by her Eras Tour movie. And while my musical tastes normally veer towards post-rock, punk and metal, her pandemic opuses Evermore and Folklore reached parts of my heart I never knew pop could touch.
So I genuinely believed Taylor could do no wrong. But unfortunately, her latest website is a masterclass in how not to design for inclusion. It's so problematic that one week ago, brand and web designer Lauren Sherrard felt compelled to call it out on LinkedIn – and frankly, she was spot on.
The orangey-red text on a green glittering background wasn't just aesthetically questionable; it was a nightmare for anyone with colour blindness. As far as I can tell, that snafu has since been cleared up, but a lot of the other issues Lauren pointed out still remain. The drop shadows on text, the tiny font sizes (at odds with these accessible fonts), the narrow typeface that blurs together... it's as if someone took every accessibility guideline and did the exact opposite.
Everybody hurts
All-caps text might look dramatic, but it's difficult for people with dyslexia to process, and screen readers often spell it out letter by letter (imagine hearing "T-A-Y-L-O-R-S-W-I-F-T" instead of her name). And those glittering effects don't just make text harder to read; for people with certain visual conditions, they can cause uncomfortable afterimages, or make the page literally painful to look at.
Imagine being a devoted Swiftie with dyslexia, trying to decipher those uniform, narrow letters that seem to melt into one another. Think about screen reader users encountering missing alt text and incorrect labelling. As Holly Tuke, a social media manager at RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) wrote in response to Lauren post: "It's so hard to be a disabled fan sometimes. When everyone else is excited, we're left feeling excluded, facing a lack of accessibility once again. And it hurts."
Let's face it, the pop industry should know better. Beyoncé faced lawsuits over similar accessibility failures on her website. Universal Music Group, Taylor's label, has faced scrutiny before. The Eras Tour itself was criticised for inaccessible ticketing systems that left disabled fans unable to buy tickets.
Yet here we are again, with similar basic mistakes repeated on one of the world's most high-profile websites.
I'd love to think Taylor herself is entirely unaware of these issues. This is, after all, an artist who's consistently shown genuine care for her fans; who's known for her advocacy for artists' rights, for her generous donations to food banks, for her support of the LGBT community. And I truly believe she's wouldn't knowingly exclude disabled fans from her art.
But someone on her team should have definitely flagged this up. With the budget and resources available to a global superstar, there's simply no excuse for launching a website that fails basic accessibility standards. And lest we forget, a website that follows accessibility guidelines isn't just better for disabled people; it's a better website, period.
Taylor's last album might have been about Tortured Poets, but her websites shouldn't torture her fans. The most beautiful thing about music is how it brings everyone together. So my plea to the music industry is: let's make sure the web design does too.
