Now scanning ... alabama.gov

Hello, this is Luke with ScanGov, and welcome back to another edition of Now Scanning. I scanned alabama.gov and there's a lot going on here. We were only able to scan one page on alabama.gov, and I'll explain why.

We scanned the one page and noticed some abnormal issues that we don't normally see with ScanGov scans. What we realized was that nearly every link, if not all links, goes to a different website. It looks like there is a plethora of different websites for Alabama digital services, and they all look different. There's no unified user interface or design. Some of them are slow, some of them are fast.

It gets to a couple of things. One, who's in charge? Who's in charge of the digital experience for Alabama? It's not clear that anybody is. What this does is two things, generally. It impacts how users experience state government services, which will impact how they think of government. But it also creates exponential cost for the state to maintain multiple digital presences.

Just a little bit of commentary on this. This is something that is abnormal. There are a couple of states that do this, but Alabama, and I think Florida is also another anomaly when it comes to this. What you're starting to see is a lot of states moving towards one domain and moving all of their subdomains up to the main domain. Hopefully, if anybody from Alabama is listening, this is something to take note of.

Just really quickly, here's the dashboard for the homepage. We couldn't really test the readability since it's a lot of links and just link text, but overall it's a C. The accessibility is an A, which isn't surprising. There's not much going on there, and I'm sure they paid a lot of attention to that for policy reasons. But you can see everywhere else, there's a broken link on the homepage, which is a little bit alarming. They're not really focused on botability and AI and search. The usability is not good, and on security, it looks like they're doing okay.

I'm going to click into the task list. You can see there are a lot of retro mistakes that shouldn't be happening in 2026. Some Open Graph, and there's no sitemap. There are just a lot of issues going on here.

I think this is why a service like ScanGov is good. Especially if you have many sites, whoever is in charge can monitor all of them and talk with the digital teams or the vendors who are managing those to ensure that they meet some sort of digital experience standards.

Overall, it is a poor digital experience, I'd say. And I would add that if Nick Saban was running this website, it wouldn't be this way. Roll Tide.