work    accessibility

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RESEARCH PAPER
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WEBSITE REPORT
HCI
ACCESSIBILITY COURSE
A
GRADE EARNED

client

At DePaul University, HCI students must choose one of the following classes as one of their major elective courses:

My only option was HCI 511, Accessibility and Design for Diverse Users, because it was the only course offered online; however, I am so glad that I took this class because it opened my eyes to a whole set of people affected by my work on websites.

objective

After participating in this course, students will be able to:

In a fair society all individuals would have equal opportunity to participate in, or benefit from, the use of computer resources regardless of race, sex, religion, age, disability, national origin or other such similar factors.
— ACM Code of Ethics

results

Movies and Response Papers


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Group Research Project

I worked in a team of four students for the final group project for this class and we focused on screen reader users and website menus. The professor liked our research paper so much that she suggested we submit it to a CHI conference.

Breadth vs. Depth in Menu Structures for Screen Reader Users

Despite decades of study, there are still mixed recommendations on what hierarchical menu structures work best for users with screen readers. The organization and structure of these menus can make the experience of using a website enjoyable and efficient or frustrating and confounding. We replicated a study from 2010 examining the breadth vs depth argument in menu structures. Consistent with some previous studies, we found that broad, shallow hierarchical menu structures outperformed deep, narrow hierarchical menu structures for screen reader users.


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Analysis of Website for Accessibility

During this class, I was working for the State of Idaho's Legislative Services Office, and I supported their existing websites. I decided to focus my report on two of the important pages in the main website for this office, found here: https://legislature.idaho.gov

This report describes the conformance of the Idaho State Legislature website, specifically the home page and 2018 Session page, with W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The tools used in the review process included W3C Easy Checks, W3C Markup Validation Service, CSS Validation Service, readable.io, WAVE, and Taw. Government websites, such as this, are required to conform to both the Revised 508 Standards and WCAG 2.0 Level AA.

The findings highlight many issues including critical items of structure/parsing errors and no visibility of focused elements; major items of navigation and visual presentation; and minor items of page titles and color contrast. A complete list of issues and recommendations can be found in this report.


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reflection




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