CPSCI 107: Applications, Implications, and Issues

Lab 10

April 3, 2006

Accessibility and General Usability Audit

I've decided that we should first conduct an accessiblity audit of the Communities That Care website before proposing a redesign of the website. So your task today is to develop some kind of metric you can use to apply to each page of the CTC website. The metric should make clear what needs to be addressed on each page as well as how accesssible each page is as it now stands.

In developing a metric, think about your task in two ways:

• from the receiving end: If you were the webmaster of the CTC website, what type of document would you find useful to assist you in making your website accessible?
• from the auditing end: In order to provide a systematic and consistent audit, what kind of guidelines do you want each person in your group to follow as you independently generate a document for each page of the target website?

In other words, for Wednesday's class, I'd like the two of you to come up with a proposal for how you'll go about auditing the CTC website. Your proposal should be specific in explaining what metric you will use to evaluate each page of the website. For example, you could use the checklist appendix of the W3C WCAG 1.0 or some other resource from the web (e.g., New York State Mandatory Technology Standard S04-001).

Keep in mind that in addition to the accessibility standards outlined in the WCAG 1.0, we'll want to pay attention to the general usability aspects of the website (as these are articulated, e.g., in the readings you've done by Jakob Nielsen). So be sure that these are included in your proposal.

We'll discuss your proposal in class on Wednesday.

Service Learning Journal

As you work on the service learning project for this course, you'll be meeting independently with your audit group. So I'd like each of you to begin keeping a service learning journal in which you summarize what's gone on in your meetings. This will be your personal take on your meetings and on the service you perform—it is not a collaborative effort. (The service is collaborative, but your reflections on the service are not.)

You'll keep your service learning journal on your warp website; put a link to it on your warp homepage. (Note that it is therefore a public document.)

The exact design of your journal webpage is up to you; it should, of course, rank high in terms of accessibility and general usability.

Your journal should contain a brief reflection on today's lab.

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