Usability & Accessibility: Evaluating your Website

In today's modern age, where every demographic has a computer screen, and in fact need their computers or mobile devices to make life easier, it is important to assess websites for usability & accessibility purposes. How easily can individuals complete the necessary tasks they need to on your website? Testing the accessibility and usability of a site can be difficult for many reasons. Sometimes, you might need multiple tools to test for usability & accessibility or might need extensive knowledge to understand usability and accessibility test results. Nonetheless, it is necessary to carry out these tests.

Since all users might not be able to access the first iteration of your website, below are some tips on technical issues that should be considered in testing and evaluating Web sites from both usability and accessibility perspectives.

1. How is the user going to access your website? On a computer screen, table tor mobile device?

2. How functional is your website across browser types?

3. What kinds of computer operating system do your users have access to?

4. Test the color depth setting because you might have color blind users?

5. Is your screen resolution?

6. Are your links working?

7. Is your navigation intuitive and consistent?

8. Is your page layout throughout the website?

9. Are the textual and visual elements clear and readable?

10. Do the graphical elements have alternative low fidelity options?

There you go!

#usability #accessibility

Computer Languages & my experience with them

My background & experience with using JavaScript or other interactive scripting languages and tools is mostly nil at this point in my life. I have some experience with Python (the computer language), but it's been a while. I took a class on introduction to Python I a couple of summers ago. I ended up creating a

hospital filing system. What I noticed that is different from CSS & HTML and basically anything else I have ever done is that the output of my code was given back to me in the same coding language i.e. there was no WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) feature. Additionally, I had to use the Python IDLE, as opposed to just any text editor? Is that a telling feature of Python or is it just that my teacher didn't want us to use any ole text editor? Maybe.

However, I'm more inclined to think that I did need to get the python IDLE because none of the albeit awesome text editors I have used have ever given me back the output of my code without another extension such as a browser.

Update:

Today in my online publishing class, we went over JavaScript. I was ready to learn something new, and I did. But, I did notice that my background with Python helped me understand a few more things about JavaScript than I would ordinarily have at a first introduction.

#scripting #onlinepub #javascript

Integrating Multimedia into Your Website

Multimedia adds interactivity to web posts. It also increases ease of access and clarity to complex information. It can also be helpful in increasing the accessibility level of a post i.e. how well is your webpage designed for people with disabilities? Additionally, it can create avenues for multimodal learners, textual learners, kinesthetic learners and auditory learners to increase their intake of information.

However, adding basic multimedia to your webpages can sometimes come with technical issues.

What are some of the technical issues in integrating basic multimedia such as audio and video into Web sites? And, what are some valid markup attributes that can be used to offset these issues?

Before HTML5 adding video and audio to webpages wasn't a smooth operation. In the past, flash was used to embed videos into webpages. However, the code for embedding the flash didn't always work across all webpages Castro & Hyslop. With HTML5, native multimedia attributes were added so that media can be added directly to the page without a plugin.

However, there are still some issues with HTML5. Since browsers are not standardized, not all audio and video formats will play. As a result, you should provide more than one content format. In HTML5, you can do that by using the video (HTML5= <video>) or audio (HTML5 = <audio>) element to contain multiple sources (HTML5 = <src>). Browsers will play first src video and the second and subsequent ones will be the fallback (Castro & Hyslop). A text or image (img) fallback should also be available in case the browser cannot play the video or its alternate(s).

You can also add flash fallbacks for browsers such as Internet Explorer (IE) 8 and earlier versions that cannot play certain audio and video contents. You cause the Media-element.js (a javascript file) to do that.

In order to create some accessibility capabilities such as captions, subtitles, descriptions, HTML5 added a new feel format called the WWBVVT (Web video Text Tracks). This makes adding these capabilities a native move as opposed to using a plugin. This can help offset the technical issues that can arise in cases where plugins don't work across web browsers or delay the loading of a webpage due to its additional size.

*All information gotten from Castro & Hyslop.