Good Web Design, Usability and Web Accessibility

1
Good Web Design,Usability andWeb Accessibility

• Ed Garay
• UIC Instructional Technology Lab
• http//www.accc.uic.edu/itl
• Academic Computing and Communications Center
  University of Illinois at Chicago

2
Session Outline

• Session logistics
• Panelists presentations
• Ed Garay, ITL
• Tom Moher, Computer Science
• Allyson Meyer, The Field Museum
• Joy Hyzny, Disability Services
• Panel discussion and QA

3
Good Web design

• Meet Website and audience objectives
• Provide concise and meaningful content
• Offer clean and intuitive design
• Provide consistent user interface
• Use effective navigation tools

4
Good Web design

• Design for the screen and exploit the Web
• Create browser-independent and platform-independen
  t hypermedia
• Write short scannable text elements
• Use consistent color schemes and color hyperlinks
• Ensure fast downloads (40KB/page)

5
Good Web design

• Design easy-to-maintain hypermedia
• Consider providing a site map
• Provide a text-only version
• Provide alternate formats
• Design for an 800x600 SVGA screen
• Include ALT tags on all your images
• Use background with good contrast

6
Examples of good Web design

• www.amazon.com
• UIC MHPE Online
• http//www.hillmancurtis.com
• http//www.adobe.com
• http//www.macromedia.com
• The Discovery Channel

7
Examples of good Web design

• http//www.sony.com
• Lynda Weinmans Website
• Jacob Nielsens Website
• http//www.exploratorium.edu
• http//www.w3.org

8
Web accessibility

• Making Web pages accessible is not hard try it,
  and make a habit of it
• New software and system versions are more
  compliant and make the job easier Blackboard,
  Macromedia, Adobe
• Provide alternate formats as often as necessary

9
Web accessibility

• Consider using SMIL to provide multiple
  concurrent format experiences
• Narrated PowerPoint presentations
• Audio and text transcript description of
  animation, imagery or video content
• Closed caption via RealText
• Narrated hypermedia

10
Related links

• ITL Web Design Seminarwww.accc.uci.edu/seminars/w
  ebdesign
• W3C Web Accessibility Initiativewww.w3.org/WAI
• Bobby www.cast.org/bobby
• Illinois Web Accessibility Standardswww100.state.
  il.us/tech/technology/accessibility
• Macromedia Accessibilitywww.macromedia.com/macrom
  edia/accessibility