STAMP+Student+Union+Website

=__**ADELE H. STAMP STUDENT UNION WEBSITE (**__[])= by Aisya Aziz (September 20th, 2011)

As many may have known, the STAMP Student Union is the center for many activities involving students, alumni, faculty, staff and community members of the University of Maryland. As one of the main building in the campus, the website should stand up more than many others; besides serving as the site for reserving rooms, it, too should provide a lot of information and a glance of how the University of Maryland would look like (the environment, the students, etc.) – for prospective students. However, from what I have evaluated, the webpage has only **partially implemented** the WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

Starting off from the first principle of the guideline, as to how perceivable the website is, the pages failed to meet many of the requirements. From the default page itself, a video is shown without an alternative text and no captions or descriptions below it. Users will not be able to even make a rough prediction of what the video is about. Based on the guideline numbered 1.2.6, since it is a pre-recorded video, a sign language should be made available to interpret the audio – that, too, is not implemented. Moreover, most textual pictures, except for one, have no alternate text on it – and the one that has it is the ‘Reservation Calendar’, but the alternate text was ‘Calendar’. The place of the image itself was not associated with any reservation text, therefore, for people who couldn’t read the text on the image would not know that the ‘Calendar’ meant the ‘Reservation Calendar’.

Apart from that, the color plays an important role in accessibility, too. However, the side menu bar failed to reach the minimum contrast ratio. The background color was a medium grey and the text was white. After checking at [], the color ratio was 2:1 – the minimum ratio for a medium sized font would be 7:1. The two numbers are of a huge difference. In the banners, the spacing of each line are too close – apart from that, the banner may have limit the number of lines for each post causing some of the words to be cut off, thus, not viewable to the users.

The second principle of the guideline is on how operable the website is. One of the first requirements is so that the links are reachable through tabs. From the pages I have checked, the links are reachable – however, the position of where the ‘current’ tab is pointing is vague - the side menu links especially. Besides that, at the campus reservation page, users will be able get to the room and check what event it is on, but, the tab could only pass one round. I could not ‘tab’ to go to the link again (after the first round). Some of the pages, such as the Video Camera Lending Program, would require you to login using the Common Login website – no headings on the reason we should login is available on the Common Login website.

On the third principle of the guidelines, the choice of words used are easy and understandable - only for people who understand English. I would consider the Understandable principle to be partially implemented - not completely. As for the final principle, the robustness of the page, since many of the pages would not require log ins and form submissions, the forms are fine. However, there are a few blank pages and link errors. (e.g. [] (blank page) and [] (none of the links at the side menu are working))

To conclude, the website doesn’t meet most of the guidelines set by WCAG 2.0. I believe that with a little more work, many of the guidelines would be achieved. (For example, colors and fonts)

__Overall Conclusion__
 * First Principle (Perceivable) : Partially Implemented
 * Second Principle (Operable) : Partially Implemented
 * Third Principle (Understandable) : Partially Implemented
 * Fourth Principle (Robust) : Partially Implemented