mariechatfield / call-my-congress Goto Github PK

Currently, there is no loading feedback on the home (search) page. Most requests don't take too long, but a user has slow or spotty internet connection, they may not know if the request has actually gone through.

I entered my zip, 30328, on the input screen and received the message “Please provide valid zip code”. 30328 is a valid zip code covering a portion of north Atlanta and Sandy Springs, GA.

I'd like to link to pages of this project in my own project but running into issues with linking.
Currently pages link like this:
https://www.callmycongress.com/NY-1
But it I use this method (industry standard) I'll get a page titled NY 1st, but without the Congressional representative, just statewide (senators):
https://www.callmycongress.com/NY-01
Ideally I'd use this format for links:
https://www.callmycongress.com/NY01

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This version is covered by your current version range and after updating it in your project the build failed.

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Incorrect addresses are expected to display the error message Could not find valid address. Please double check the street address and zip code.

When searching by zip code alone, the generic Something went wrong. message is displayed for invalid zip codes.

Both requests should respond with {"translationKey":"INVALID_ADDRESS"}

I tested CallMyCongress.com on Safari with VoiceOver, and for the most part everything seemed clearly labelled and decent to navigate.

However, there were two pain points I'd like to address:

• When you search for a valid address, the error message shows up above the form. There's no alert via the screen reader that new information has appeared, and it's not intuitive to look above your current focus.
• When the route transitions to a new view (i.e. going from search to district view, or back, or displaying multiple possible districts) there's not good feedback that the view has changed. Going from search to district does change the focus to the starting h1 element, but there's no context.

I think these are both related to the nature of single page apps, but I'm sure I can do something to improve accessibility here.

Possible resources to consider:

• http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/make-single-page-apps-work-screen-readers-101517155
• http://simplyaccessible.com/article/spangular-accessibility/
• https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/modern-web-fundamentally-broken-people-disabilities

I received the following "Provided URL does not map to a valid state and district number." when I looked up my (non-voting) representative from the District of Columbia. Please ensure that all Americans are able to use this to find their representatives, voting or not.

Hi - this is awesome!!!

we are hearing from congressional offices that the local office phone are important. It would be great if you added that info.

Many thanks,

sas

Allow users to return to the home page (search view) by clicking anywhere on the header bar.

Currently, the only way to get to the home page from a district page is to click the Search Again button, but on smaller devices this button may be pushed down out of view.

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According to a former congressional staffer, it can be far more effective to call your congressional representatives at their regional offices than at their DC offices.

Currently GovTrack.us only provides DC phone numbers via its API. This feature request may require finding another API that does provide regional numbers.

To reproduce:

• Search for a zipcode that falls within multiple congressional districts (one is 49410)
• Click one of the suggested congressional districts
• Use the web browser's Back button

Expected: To be back on the screen I just came from with the list of possible congressional districts.

Actual: I'm back on the home screen with both fields empty and no information about my previous search results.

Unfortunately, as you can see from the screenshot below, when I tried the website with just the zip code, “something went wrong.” When I typed in the address as well as the zip code, I received a message that says “Provided URL does not map to a valid state and district number.”
I used my home address, so I know it’s correct.

From a first look at the issue, it seems that the server response is returning a properly formatted response that has no districts:

{"districts":[]}

In addition to fixing whatever the underlying problem is, I'll also need to provide better error handling for this sort of bug in the future.

I tried looking up rep on https://www.callmycongress.com/ using my zip code - 59937, and several other Montana zip codes including the state captial, Helena (59601) and received the following message...

District number provided does not exist in your state.

I tried it for a Washington state zip and it did work...

https://www.callmycongress.com/WA-2

I am not familiar with the code that callmycongress uses, but did a little looking and found that one of the sites listed at the bottom of the page is whoismyrepresentative.com. I tried the montana zips using the PHP syntax from following page and got no results... http://www.whoismyrepresentative.com/api
Using the zip code lookup on the following page was successful: http://whoismyrepresentative.com/
It returned the following web page: http://whoismyrepresentative.com/search/zip/59937 with the correct reps.

Not sure if any of this is relevant or helpful. Just thought I would let you know that the site is not fully functional.

Some people may be hesitant (and rightly so) to enter their address. Providing an address should be optional.

Possible data sources for zip -> congressional district lookup

• https://sunlightlabs.github.io/congress/districts.html
• http://whoismyrepresentative.com/api (district number is in the entry for the house representative) http://whoismyrepresentative.com/getall_mems.php?zip=10001&output=json

Feature request:

One thing I was hoping to find on it though, would be the addresses of different Congress People's offices, both in DC and in their own districts.

The phone lines have been pretty jammed for most Congressional offices since the election (a great thing!). So having that physical address helps to send a letter that is harder to ignore than an email and gets tracked in the office.

I also love supporting the post office!

In the theme of keeping things simple, I'm not sure adding extra information to each row in the districts page is the right direction. A few possible solutions:

• Link out to each representative's full profile on GovTrack.us, or their website
• Create a new view for each representative, with more detailed information. Could use same GovTrack.us API currently being used, even use the same ID. i.e. /person/:id. For Sen. Barbara Boxer: https://www.govtrack.us/api/v2/role?id=3853

Hi there! I just forked your repo and ran locally yesterday. I ran into issues with starting the backend before the frontend - nodemon just ends up in this restart loop then errors out. Starting the frontend before backend is fine, tho Nodemon seems to restart more with changes than it should. It looks like adding ignore flags on line 16 of the package.json start script helps this

    "backend": "PORT=3000 nodemon backend/app/server.js --ignore tmp/ --ignore app/",

Let me know if you see this on your end too - I'm happy to put in a PR.

Request via email:

Is it possible to add the legislator's email address and official webpage to the search results?

Unfortunately, GovTrack.us's API does not expose email addresses for representatives. However, it does provide websites. That information should already be passed from the server, so a small change in the client is the only thing needed to display this additional information.

Reference:
Role API
Person API

At some point in the future, GovTrack.us will deprecate its APIs (possibly summer 2017).

ProPublica offers an API that can look up current members by state or district. However, at this time that API does not expose phone numbers (but it does offer Twitter handles).

whoismyrepresentative.com exposes phone numbers via its API, and is currently used by call-my-congress to look up districts by zip code alone. However, the API does not have an option to search by district, and it is unclear who owns the site or how to get updates on API changes. May also want to consider replacing current dependence on this site for the zip code to district lookup.

Both the House and Senate expose contact information of members by XML, and both do include DC phone numbers. However, it doesn't look like there's a way to get a subset of the list by district or state.

Possible option: every new election, spend some time mapping data provided by the House and Senate into some database (maybe Firebase?). Would be more time overhead and more prone to error. But that might also be an option to help provide local office numbers (#3) if I can't find an API that provides them.

There are no immediate plans to deprecate GovTrack.us' API, but this is something to consider and keep in mind. Please add any thoughts or suggestions for other APIs here if you know of any!