One goal of this project is to help expose more underrepresented groups to the world of information technology. If our online presence is not easily accessible by people with visual impairments, issues with motor functionality, and other attributes that require special methods to get information from the web, then we are failing these overarching goals of accessibility.
A common tool used for internet-accessibility is a screen reader. These programs scan the HTML and CSS of web pages and read their content aloud for the user to hear. One of the most important aspects of web accessibility is building pages that can essentially 'play well' with these accessibility tools.
Several online services have the ability to access a website's accessibility: The website accessibility evaluation tool (or WAVE for short), and AChecker. Freddy and I used these to evaluate the three main websites we use for this project. Their results and commentary are as follows:
A common tool used for internet-accessibility is a screen reader. These programs scan the HTML and CSS of web pages and read their content aloud for the user to hear. One of the most important aspects of web accessibility is building pages that can essentially 'play well' with these accessibility tools.
Several online services have the ability to access a website's accessibility: The website accessibility evaluation tool (or WAVE for short), and AChecker. Freddy and I used these to evaluate the three main websites we use for this project. Their results and commentary are as follows:
LatinaTech.org
Our website has a few errors in terms of accessibility. For
users that need screen readers, alt-text for elements is necessary to describe
pictures. None of the images on our website have alt-text, however, this is a
fairly easy fix and will not take long to remedy.
The other main issue with latinatech.org is the contrast
ratio of some text elements on the background. The design language of this website (links are orange +
underlined) does not follow the 1:4.5 ratio of background to text color on some
elements (mostly external links). To fix this, we would need to pick a
different color to make all of the links on our page. This will take a bit longer than fixing the image alt-texts, but it will be beneficial for users that have poor eyesight.
Casa-Latina.org
Many of the issues that LatinaTech.org had hold true for this
website as well. None of the images have alt-text, which makes understanding
the content difficult for users that cannot view images (or understand their
significance).
The administrators of casa-latina.org can remedy this by
modifying the HTML markup that makes up the site. This is not difficult for any
web-savvy person to accomplish as long as they have access to the source code (which we do not)html tab
.
.
LatinaTech.blogspot.com
I am actually impressed with how few accessibility errors
our blog has. Freddy’s accessibility reports only pointed out two different kinds
of errors: The HTML document language is not specified, and the alt-texts for
the little ‘edit’ pencil icons are not written. For any non-administrative
user, they will never encounter these icons, so we need not take action here. I
can fiddle with the HTML backend of our blog and try to fix the language header
soon. Hopefully this will help users with visual impairments and
screen-readers.
Tools used:
http://wave.webaim.org/
Tools used:
http://wave.webaim.org/
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