University of South Alabama Library Website Design and Accessibility Evaluation

Site Design In this section, I highlight some positive and negative features of the University of SouthAlabama Library’s website from the standpoint of good website design. I lean heavily upon Lynch and Horton’s Web Style Guide: 3 rd Edition for my criteria for good site design. 2

Design: The Wheel Positive – Users can easily grasp the underlying hub and spoke site structure. Broadly understanding how to navigate a web site can be just as important as knowledge of its content. 3

Design: The Broken Wheel Negatives – Users have very limited ability to “hop” from one spoke on the wheel to another without first passing back through the hub. Also, the inconsistent layouts and interfaces of sections of the site make the whole seem a bit incongruous. 4

Design: Simplicity Adapts Positive – The simple, textual design of the site transitions quite well between the Basic and No Style views. Basic ViewNo Style View 5

Design: Information Overload Negatives – The site contains far too many texts links on the homepage, creating a site structure that is too shallow. It is easy to miss what you are looking for in that sea of text, and users will easily be overwhelmed. The site could use some images, cut some information completely, and also move some information a layer or two down. This move allows for better use of page space. 6

Design: Indicators Positive – The site has a good use of indicators (bold text, indentation, color) to help sort links into categories and distinguish category titles from links. 7

Design: Positional Sense Negative – Though the site navigation provides some indicators for parsing links by category, I am not sure, for the sidebar specifically, that there is a logical order to the categories themselves or to the list of links for each category. The order of the links in the main content section appears much more coherent. 8 <- Seems Logically Intuitive Not So Sure ->

Design: Search Me Negative – With such a huge amount of information on the site, search functionality seems essential. However, the website lacks any kind of feature that would allow users to search site contents. 9 According to good web standards, a search box should be located in this area of the page (see Lynch and Horton).

Design: Objectives Achieved Positive – The site has a clear goal, and it achieves what it sets out to do, though perhaps not in the most efficient or aesthetically pleasing way. 10

Design: Lacking Ambition? Negative – The site’s goal is in line with the goal of Web 1.0: providing content. Web 2.0 has arrived, and the only such feature on this site is a blog. Given that its users are mainly college students, perhaps incorporating more Web 2.0 features would enhance the average user’s experience. 11

Site Accessibility This section contains both positive and negative points concerning the web accessibility of the University of South Alabama Library’s website. The criteria for accessibility are found in the Conformance Evaluation of Web Sites for Accessibility test at the W3C website. This test ensures that a site adheres to WCAG 1.0 and Section 508 guidelines. 12

Accessibility: Validation? 13 Negative – W3C HTML Validation service found nine errors and had five warning for the homepage URL Positive – W3c CSS Validation service found no errors.

Accessibility: Online Evaluators Positive – Functional Accessibility Evaluator 1.1, the online accessibility evaluation tool by the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, gave the site favorable marks. It received a 100% pass grade in the categories of Text Equivalents, Styling, Scripting and HTML Standards. 14

Accessibility: Online Evaluators Negative – According to Total Evaluator 7.4, there is an aspect of the homepage that does not adhere to either WCAG 1.0 or Section 508: no tags found in tables. This error is a grave one for blind users who require special software that scans the website code and reads the site content to the user. 15