Service Learning Journal

This page contains my reflections on group and individual work on the service learning project for CPSCI 107 this Spring. It will include both my perspective on what was accomplished and my feelings about these accomplishments.

The audit will be of the Oneida area's Communities That Care website. We will work on usability, accessibility, and general design aspects of the site.

Site links

• Home page

Page contents

• April 3, 2006
• April 5, 2006
• April 10, 2006
• April 12, 2006

Service learning journal

April 3, 2006

General information

The CTC web site is www.ctconeida.org. their navigation menu (sans styling) contains the following links:

• CTC Home Page
• About CTC
  • Partners & Participants
  • Board of Directors
  • Grant Process
  • Event Calendar
• Community Corner
• Caring Communities
  • Cornhill
  • Waterville
• Research & Reports
• Media Kit
  • Fast Facts
  • Press Releases
  • Key Publications
  • Quote Gallery
  • News & Events
• Links to Resources
• Contact CTC

Initial findings and notes

On the Research & Reports main page, there is a form for subscribing to a news letter, but the form boxes and buttons are not obvious, or even really visible in the case of the text input boxes. This makes it difficult to fill out or make much sense of the form (in Firefox and Opera, not in Internet Explorer). The Do it! button is neither clearly a button, nor clear in its purpose.

The concept behind the layout (site identification header at top, site navigation on left and bottom, and the page title and sub links at the top center) is good, but it needs help in implementation, particularly with layout mechanism and cross-browser support.

Evaluation method

We plan to work with the W3C's WAI WCAG Accessibility Guidelines Checklist to measure the site's metrics of usability, compatibility, and accessibility.

April 5, 2006

Inspiration from last year's evaluations

Today, we examined the usability audits from last year's class in search of inspiration and shortcomings so that we may incorporate and improve upon their methods. They took a few different approaches to evaluating their subject sites, from which we will take the best to combine with our own discoveries. So far, we have on the table:

• Use the W3C code standard compliance validator and the OCAWA code accessibility validator to assure that the page code is compliant with established standards for the relevant version of HTML.
• Check the pages against the W3C's Web Accessibility Guidelines Checklist to find the status of their conformance to WAI WCAG accessibility recommendations.
• We will also use Jakob Nielson's web accessibility guidelines.
• Evaluate the site for usability and accessibility based on our own experience as users.
• Test the features, styles, layout, and functionality in a variety of browsers on multiple platforms.

Next up, we will collaborate to bring our ideas together and hopefully have a cogent framework for evaluating the CTC site.

April 10, 2006

Making a scoring rubric

Today, we worked out how we will score the CTC pages to rank accessibility and compliance. We plan to do the following:

• Count and rank failings on the WCAG checkilist.
• Count (and do some ranking) failings on the W3C and OCAWA validators.
• Write out general and specific usability comments we find along the way.

Next time we will perform this audit on a few pages to test it and them out. My audits will be (in the list from April 3, 2006) the Home Page and from Media Kit through Contact CTC.

April 12, 2006

First audits

Today, I performed the first page audits for the CTC site. The results are as follows:

• Home page: 11 code validation issues and 19 accessibility issues.
• Contact CTC: 12 code validation issues and 18 accessibility issues.