"WEBSITE USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY OF OSLO UNIVERSITY LIBRARY"
Anna Brzeska
Master Thesis 2004
GOALS
ANALYSIS
>>Library Users
>>UBO Website
>>UBO Site Map
>>Broken Links
METHODS
Questionnaires
>>Part A
>>Part B
>>Part C
>>Questions for the students
Interviews
>Answers empoyees
>Answers students
Card Sort
>>Result Cart Sort
Web servers logs
Usability testing
Accessibility testing
UBO website blind
Accessibility design
PROTOTYPE
WEBSITE REDESIGN
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
RECOMMENDATIONS
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
REPORT
References
>>Books
Glossary
Appendixs
Software
Supervisor
Examiner
Website Accessibility glossary
AccessibilityWebsites can be designed to meet the needs of all people, including those with disabilities
Audience the term technical writers as well as web designers often use audience. If you understand the characteristics of the people who are most likely to use a website, you can design the website to fit their needs.
D link A description link, the letter D placed next to an image on a web page that links off to a description of the image. This helps blind users or users of text browsers to understand the content of an image, without seeing it.
guideline a usability or accessibility principle. Accessibility guidelines refer to all the paragraphs specified in Section 508 (labeled as 508(a), 508(b), etc.) and a few W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Usability guidelines are general usability factors like navigability, searchability, flexibility, etc.
Issues the result of applying a test on a page or site.
Manual issuean issue that warns the user that a manual inspection of the page (or site) is needed in order to determine if a guideline has been violated. These are potential problems that are pending, awaiting for human inspection to determine their status.
Priority each test is associated to a priority level:
priority 1 is the most important one: violation of these tests are significant issues;
priority 2 is less important: violations are major issues;
priority 3 is even less important: violations are minor issues;
priority 4 is the least important one, meaning that tests with this priority yield only information issues.
Accessibility tests have all priority 1.
Screen reader a program that reads out a computer display for the visually impaired person or for those that do not have access to monitor. It can display information in Braille alphabet or use audio signals.
Text-only browser - is just that, a browser that displays text only. While a user browses web pages, these applications grab all available text including alt attributes, summary tags, etc. and present it to the user in a user-customizable environment. This technology is used by people with various disabilities. Since text-only browsers ignore most webs formatting, color does not have an adverse effect. A user might use these applications along with a free screen reader. Text-only browsers are also great tools for checking the text accessibility of your webpage, since they will reveal exactly what content — and in what order — most screen readers and refreshable Braille displays will present.
Card Sort A method for testing the structure of a web site using index cards. Participants arrange the cards in an order or structure that makes sense to use them.
Category Membership Expectation A method that tests the participants' understanding of various categories including what they think should be in each category and what the category should be named.
Cognitive Walkthrough Designers of the web site or product try to predict users' movements and actions by doing actual tasks themselves
Contextual Enquiryis a technique for examining and understanding users and their workplace, tasks, issues and preferences.
Ethnographyan approach to research which involves in-depth study through observation, interviews, and artifact analysis in an attempt to gain a thorough understanding from many perspectives.
FAQ Frequently Asked Questions, an acronym named by webmasters who always being asked the same set of questions over and over.
Focus group is a group of carefully selected potential users of the website. They are presented with the new system and are encouraged to provide comments to the group facilitator.
HCI Human Computer Interaction ,is a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them.
Human factors an important study in website design. Websites should always be designed with an eye toward human limitation i.e. the design of the website must address the real world issues.
Prototype a representation of a design for the purpose of evaluation
Task a set of interactions performed by user to complete a peace of work.
Usability lab a lab designed for user testing, typically room width computer equipment and a space for a observer to sit, along with a observation area and equipment for videotaping.Computer are set up with logging software to capture users keystrokes and muse movements, and with scan converters, used to videotape computers screen.
User Any person who actually interacts with a system
User Cantered Design UCD, is a philosophy and a process. It is a philosophy that places the person at the centre,s a process that focuses on cognitive factors (such as perception, memory, learning, problem solving, etc.) as they come into play during peoples' interactions with things.
User Interface Design Environments (UIDE)
User Interface Management Systems (UIMS)
User testing a family of methods for evaluating a user interface by collecting data from people actually using the system.
UIDE User Interface Design Environments
UIMS User Interface Management Systems
3 clics rule The principle that access to any feature of an application, or each logical step in a process, should require no more than 3 clicks. Applying this principle can be tricky because of the illdefined nature of what constitutes a primary feature or logical step (what level of granularity is relevant to making this design), but it nevertheless is a helpful rule of thumb in trying to minimize the steps necessary to perform tasks. However, religious adherence to this rule, as with many others, is probably misguided.
Web engineering glossary
Browser a program that lets users interacts with all the information on the www.
Home page is the welcome page of the website. This page is typically the highest level of a portal hierarchy.
HTTP HyperText Transfer Protocol, the protocol used by the WWW. It defines how messages are transmitted, and what actions webserverver and web browser should take in response to various commands.
Log files Files that record and store the raw data of website trafic
Intranet is an internal website that is created using standard web technology and accessed using standard web browsers but is available only to users on the inside of a firewall or other boundary. This is usually created by an organisation to provide content and services to its employees or members without allowing external people to view it.
Interface the part of the screen that user can see, i.e. Internet Explorer are an interface used to explore the Internet.
Meta tag A special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. It provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices. Navigation That which facilities movement from one web page to another web page.
Page a file or combination of files in the portal that are designed to be viewed simultaneously. In most cases a pages are written in HTML code.
Portal An online space that allows user to access information in a consolidated location, to search and retrieve documents and to collaborate with each other. Users access portals with web browser software such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.
Search engines A search engine is software that scours the Internet collecting data about every web site and every web page within a web page that it can. Each link that is encountered along the way is added to a list of pages to be scanned. This type of software has a lot of different names like a bot, a robot, a crawler or a spider. It takes all this collected data and stores it in a huge database. When you do a search on a "search engine" you are actually searching its database and not the actual Internet. Like many terms used on the Internet and computers in general this term is often misused and abused. For the sake of our discussion here we’ll call the "Search Engine" the piece of software that scours the web day and night updating its database.
Site Usage Logs A method of using web server (httpd) logs to track users' movements on a web site. This is especially useful for determining patterns of movement and use.
URL Uniform Resource Locator, the global address of documents and other resources on the WWW.
Web page a document on the WWW. Every web page is identified by unique URL.
Website A set of interconnected web pages usually including homepage, located on the same server, and prepared and maintained as a collection of information by a person, group or organisation.
Web Server Computer hardware where web pages are stored and accessed by others using a web browser.
World Wide Web WWW , A system of Internet that support specially formatted document. The documents are formatted in HTML language that supports links to other documents.
Glossary Word document
Source: Usabilityfirst
« Back
Chalmers University of Technology
412 96 Göteborg ,Sweden
Contact: Anna Brzeska
My webpage on Chalmers
http://dtek.chalmers.se/~d99annab
This webpage URL address: http://hem.bredband.net/annbrz
Göteborg, october 2004
412 96 Göteborg ,Sweden
Contact: Anna Brzeska
My webpage on Chalmers
http://dtek.chalmers.se/~d99annab
This webpage URL address: http://hem.bredband.net/annbrz
Göteborg, october 2004