Assignment "Accessibility"
Learning goals
After the assignment the student should:
- be able to understand the principles underlying accessible Web design;
- be able to conduct a basic accessibility evaluation based on the
W3C checkpoints;
- have gained experience in writing a technical evaluation report;
- have gained experience in presenting results to a non-technical
audience, both in written and in oral form.
Background: This exercise builds on the subjects
students have learned during the first three assignments. You will
need knowledge about HTML, CSS and scripting to understand the issues
involved in evaluating accessibility. Many principles of accessible
design are actually principles of usability design in general.
The assignment
- Select a major Dutch site to conduct a accessibility
evaluation. Groups should as much as possible select different
sites. Consult the student assistant to check whether your choice is
acceptable. In the appendix you can find a
few suggestions.
- Check the accessibility of the site with the help of the W3C
Accessibility Checkpoints. Select 4-6 typical pages of the Web
site to base your evaluation on.
- Write a technical report about the results, typically
containing:
- Date of the evaluation
- URLs of the Web site and the specific pages studied in the
evaluation
- Table detailing the results of the evaluation per
checkpoint
- Write a newspaper article with a length of 250-300 words in
which you summarize the results for a nontechnical audience. Follow
the common structure of newspaper article: the first paragraph
summarizes the subject and the main results; the followup paragraphs
provide more details. Give 1-3 useful "See also" links at the end of
the article. Add to the article also a green card (fine, maybe a few
minor problems), a yellow card (some serious problems, but not
disastrous) or red card (too many serious accessibility problems)
as the overall judgment of the Web site.
- Prepare a presentation of (maximum) four slides. You will be
assigned 5 minutes to present your results to other people in
your lab group. See the lab schedule for details of time and place.
Hints and Tips
- You are free in your choice of editing tool for writing the
report and the article.
- You can use the Web
Developer toolbar (a Firefox add-on) to help
examining Web pages. With this toolbar you can easily inspect the
CSS, disable style sheets, disable Javascript, and so on.
- Use you own judgment to assign a green, yellow or red
card.
- W.r.t. the presentation: in 5 minutes with 4 slides you cannot
give a full account of what you've done. A suggested structure for
the presentation is: 1 slide about the Web site you evaluated, 1
slide about the overall results (including the card you assigned),
and 2 slides with juicy details of the evaluation, e.g. a problem
you found.
Submission details
Check the Blackboard site of the course for submission details.
Appendix
Suggestions for Web sites to consider: