Accessibility+Assignment+SEE

By: Zach Boldyga

SEE, or the Student Entertainment Events group, is in place to schedule and promote entertainment events on campus. The website should ideally be very accessible since many students probably use it. The breakdown follows:


 * 1) Perceivable, not implemented: There is one text alternative on the website that indicates flash should be downloaded. Unfortunately, images are used throughout the entire page in place of vital text. The page header is an image of text, meaning that unless the user already knows what S.E.E. stands for (the page title), they will be unable to determine what website they are looking at. Secondly, images are used for text in the only links to the main content pages of the website. This includes the top right header links and also the titles below the flash player in the content section of the page. Therefore, It is not possible for a user who can't render images to properly navigate a large portion of the SEE website. Another major flaw, in my opinion, is using the flash player to display the upcoming and important content in the center of the page - with no alternative. Without flash, the key information that the SEE page has to offer is completely absent. Aside from alternatives, the layout and design of the website is mostly acceptable. Design wise, there is a nice contrast between text and background colors (black vs white), and most of the content text can be re-sized without an issue. In terms of the layout, there are three main horizontal sections stacked: a header, a center content area, and a footer. The header could use slightly more descriptive organization since there are two sets of links presented in it and the code does not tell a distinction between them. The center content area would also probably work out a little more nicely if it were wrapped in a div or table element and arranged with HTML rather than CSS. This area is still presented in the correct order in HTML, however. Lastly, the footer might contain a bit too much information, perhaps another horizontal section could be provided to differentiate between useful information and links, but even in the current format everything in this area should be interpreted nicely from a programmatic standpoint.
 * 2) Operable, partially implemented: Most of the page is keyboard accessible in an intuitive order, but the main header menu and flash portion of the page are not, preventing keyboard access to most of the SEE website and content. The links are also minimally navigable due to the lack of text descriptions, but there is no ambiguity in page names, meaning users should at least be able to differentiate between links. Lastly, the flash player has a menu that allows easier navigation by mouse, but the timing of the player could also use adjustment to prevent the necessary use of the pause button - in my opinion the slides move too fast.
 * 3) Understandable, complete: The text is clearly in English, and is easy to understand. Perhaps the 'News Feed' section of the footer could be reworded to cater to greater audiences, but every other section is written simply and the SEE acronym is explained. Aside from the text, nothing out of the ordinary occurs when moving the mouse around, and there is no user input to deal with.
 * 4) Robust, partially implemented: The page lacks proper line break tags - they aren't properly closed. There are also several closing tags that do not correspond to an opening tag (a and also an ). Lastly, there are numerous attributes that do not exist for the element they are provided for. It doesn't seem that any of these problems will ultimately affect parsing of information from the page, however.

As a whole, I feel that this page does not implement the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and is not accessible.