Accessibility Audit

Introduction

Nowadays, simply making a website using HTML, CSS and Javascript is not enough because of the increasing standards of the industry. Here I would like to conduct an accessibility audit of the DIGITAL Design + Development in three main modules which are Accessibility standards and constant form modal, principles, and accessibility challenges.

Accessibility standards

To begin with, the first consideration of the audit is cognitive load, which means the amount of information being represented using six different views such as Grouping, Chunking, Hierarchy, Anchors, Consistency, and Grid.

Firstly, I believe the entire page is grouped in such a way that it increases the users’ readability and understanding. Furthermore, I observed, only limited content sections with appropriate headings in column grid views, and the entire page is structured with a pyramidal hierarchy also instead of making long paragraphs, information is well distributed, which eventually makes it easy to find as a result, it becomes a consistent source for important novels and reduces distraction.

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Secondly, the language is used to create a site as it plays a major role in the agreement of user-to-site.

it is important to use one language at a time to make websites more productive with other considerable factors like short words, literal, and references. As I went through the page, rather than using long words, it was easily understandable and well structured because of the usage of shorter words with NO idioms, abbreviations, acronyms, or jargon in any information. Also, it is good practice to avoid homonyms, heteronyms, words from other languages, and words that target particular cultures, which create confusion while reading, and the page mentioned in this article has matched all the above criteria. In addition, the only missing thing I felt was the instructions and summary which define some technical terms for non-technical background users could have a more positive impact. Apart from this, every piece of information is well placed in terms of language usage.

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The third and maybe the most important factor to make any site more effective is to choose colors very carefully since it creates the first impression of the emotional connection of the user to the site and it becomes very critical to use the required hue and saturation also with regards of grayscale tone should be optimal and only remark I would like to suggest is at some section color combinations can have better, although current colors are matching quite well.

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Last but not the least, typography plays a vital role in web design which increases consistency which can be divided into six main categories; Selecting typeface, size, spacing, length, alignment, and formatting. For example, it is good practice to use three fonts (not identical numbers)., maintaining width which should not be too wide or narrow in width thickness, and differentiating main and secondary text with size and weight also spacing in between; in addition number of characters in line should be in the range of 56 (most conventional) and must be less than 100, avoiding all caps at once and flush or ragged alignment. What I discovered on this page is all the important factors are being taken care of wisely.

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Principles of Web Accessibilty

It is very important to preview any website before making it available to the user that it follows the four primary tenets of web accessibility and here are those Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.

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First of all, a website contains many components which really need to be presented in such a way that all users can recognize it become more the website, have better the colors, typefaces and sound effects; more are the chances of its being effective. Not only that, it should be perceivable to users with detrimental vision in the form of alternative text, speech, larger views, or braille (a systematic approach to overcome reading and writing for people with eyesight problems such as low vision). Mentioned content can be created using contrast colors, fonts, and size; also it is better to approach providing transcripts of audio or video content. In today’s web page it does not have any visual or audio content; also other information is useful with all interfaces; however, In my belief colors can have better contrast with other typefaces.

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Similarly, the principle of operability can simply be defined as a platform-independent website interface, which means no matter on which browser or device it is being rendered, it should be able to deliver the same performance. To illustrate, a website form should be accessible with just the use of keyboard keys like Tab key, the same can be applicable to some icons and logos to be large enough to be clickable via mouse. The presented web page has clear navigation, titles, and does not have clues that are not necessary in this case. Finally, it has met all the operability concepts like having clear accessible logos, buttons, and links.

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Likewise, instead of making the complex interface by creating cultural, intellectual; use of simple yet effective ways to proceed, such as small chunks of text rather than long, boring paragraphs with proper headings and if possible then to provide useful guidance to the user. In this segment, this website has above average performance as it has no user guide, but all the content has been put in a systematic manner which is noticeable.

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The last tenet for accessibility is robustness, which is again the compatibility of the website over the different devices regardless of their hardware or software. In addition, the foundation should be logically elaborated using structured HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The main reason behind this is that not each and every user accesses the website through the same device and not. Interestingly, when I started to test websites on different platforms like on my mobile phone, computer, and tablet, the responsiveness of the website was super smooth few things which can be ignored, rendered quite late.

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Accessibility Challenges

In conclusion, each and every site can be differentiated into four categories which are Critical, Serious, Moderate, and Minor based on their performance with respect to accessibility challenges. DIGITAL Design + Development has minor issues in terms of perceivability and understandability; however, it can be improved in the operable department by creating a user guide. At last, no issues while testing robustness.

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Summary

1. Writing content and styling is only half the work done that needs to be tested with different proportions.
2. The above-mentioned site nearly matches all accessibility standards with a score of 4.5/5 in perceivable, understandable, and 5/5 in robustness, and with little changes to consider 4/5 operable.