Inclusive Design
This project was submitted as part of the HCI Design MSc.
Analysing and reporting the accessibility compliance of the website “stemettes.org” to identify how well the site is structured in supporting users with several types of disabilities and impairments.
Role and Approach
UX Designer
Review against WCAG 2.1 guidelines
Autism Accessibility guidelines, personas
Six weeks
Tools
VoiceOver screen reader
Keyboard,
WAVE accessibility evaluation tool
Background
This report analyses the accessibility of the website “stemettes.org” to identify how the website's structure supports the needs of users with several types of disabilities. Stemettes wanted us to help them improve their site and make it more accessible for potential users, guaranteeing a pleasant user experience.
People with disabilities depend on assistive technology to navigate and interact through a website. Such technology consists of screen readers, keyboard commands and magnification. As a result, it is essential for web-based content to be accessible to all users, especially people with blindness and low vision, deafness and hard of hearing, autism spectrum disorders, motor and cognitive impairment.
The process
The Stemettes website was inspected to determine whether fundamental guidelines were enforced. Each page was evaluated thoroughly; we examined the perceivable, operable, understandable and robust to see whether accessibility has been implemented on each page. The accessibility audit was conducted on the Homepage, Meet the team page, Events page and Newsletter sign-up page.
A custom scale was created to prioritise how server errors would impact users with disabilities and impairments. The report also includes findings tablets, which list all identified issues, why they are crucial, and how they can be fixed.
Persona
To assess the website precisely, I used a set of personas affected by cognitive, motor, hard of hearing and low vision impairments. One of the personas created for this project was Trecer, a 20-year-old university student with Autism spectrum disorder. The accessibility audit identified several breached WCAG 2.1 were violated.
Determining Guidelines
The accessibility audit was conducted by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 up to conformance level AA and Autism Accessibility Guidelines. The audit consisted of examining all the elements of all given pages. There were two ways of checking this: manually and the input of “WAVE”, an automated tool. A screen reader, keyboard and different magnification levels were also introduced during the process.
Findings
To report the findings to the “Stemettes” team, I prioritised the findings based on the seriousness of the issue. A full report was produced outlining the findings with recommendations for improvements. Severity scores were given to all identified issues from all four pages. The level of severity was based on how crucial the identified issues would be to users with disabilities. 1 being less server and 4 being high risk
