Usability or deep thoughts about equal access

Here is a good tool to check if a web page meets various accessibility standards:  EvalAccess.

I checked my website (http://www.huffmanlegal.com/) and found these errors:

Report resume

                        Priority 1         Priority 2         Priority 3

Errors                    2                      0                     1

Warnings               16                    19                   21

 

I was amazed that my site has 2 priority 1 errors and 16 warnings but I guess I never thought enough about accessibility when I created my site.  I used commercial software to design my page based on a template.  Apparently the original template designer did not concern themselves with W3C/WAI or accessibility in general.  I suspect many pages have similar problems.

My sister-in-law was an executive director for a non-profit that specialized in helping people design accessible web sites and use technology that allows them to live productive lives.  It amazes me when I read all the accessibility issues that a web designer needs to consider when creating a fully-accessible page. 

But the work pays off!  Accessibility means equality.  People who could not fully appreciate and use your site can not get far more out of it.  They can see the text better or have the images read to them so they can see what they are missing or they can navigate around the site better if elements for assistive technologies are integrated better into the site framework.

Information Architecture

Creating web sites is like constructing a building.  It encompasses everything from the core materials to the eye-catching design and all the detailed work that's done in between to accomplish the goals of the structure and the needs of those who will use it.

I have friends who work in this profession.  I will admit there are times I thought "oh yeah, such hard work - right. You make sure the we page looks like a web page and you make sure the colors match the company stationary and the right buzzwords are peppered throughout the site."  Well, I am wrong.  There's much more to it than that.  In fact, it take to the extreme, one might say designing a web page takes a village.  Planning, committees and standards are at play here.

IA is defined as:  "...the categorization of information into a coherent structure, preferably one that the most people can understand quickly, if not inherently. It's usually hierarchical, but can have other structures, such as concentric or even chaotic."  (Thanks, Wikipedia)

And, surprisingly, this field has some grounding in Library Science.  Librarians are adept at categorizing and organizing information.  Before I decided to enter the world or librarianship and get my MLIS I would never have thought librarians were masters as designing the structure and strategy of web pages.  Amazing!

That's all I have for this week... back I go to planning and plotting a web site...

Discoveries this week

Major Learning

This week involved more in-depth understanding of how the internet works.  It’s amazing how much goes on behind the scenes when someone pulls up a single web page.  Apparently your computer uses a router and modem to send packets of information to a server which hosts the information via a domain name directory.  The domain name is a easier way for us to communicate and remember because it’s actually translated into numbers called an IP (Internet Protocol) address. 

My “Aha!” Discovery:

I will borrow from Jeff Tyson to explain how an IP works:

A typical IP address looks like this:

216.27.61.137

To make it easier for us humans to remember, IP addresses are normally expressed in decimal format as a dotted decimal number like the one above. But computers communicate in binary form. Look at the same IP address in binary:

11011000.00011011.00111101.10001001

The four numbers in an IP address are called octets, because they each have eight positions when viewed in binary form. If you add all the positions together, you get 32, which is why IP addresses are considered 32-bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions can have two different states (1 or zero), the total number of possible combinations per octet is 2⁸ or 256. So each octet can contain any value between zero and 255. Combine the four octets and you get 2³² or a possible 4,294,967,296 unique values!

From Jeff Tyson, How internet infrastructure works, http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/internet-infrastructure5.htm

Major Challenge:

I have little reason for challenges this early in the course.  I suspect my biggest challenge in designing a web page will be compartmentalizing the information and translating the look and feel I have to a workable structure.  I hope my left and right brains play well. J

Introduction

About Me
I am a lawyer-turned-librarian.  I have a BA in International Relations (Drake U.), JD in Law (Drake U.), and am working on my MLIS at Saint Catherine University.  I was a library associate at a health sciences library for eight years, lawyer for over 10 years and now the Washington County Law Librarian (Stillwater) since 2008.

Web Design Experience/Goals
I hope to learn rudimentary HTML, XHTML skills and a broader understanding of web page design.

I have created a couple of web pages - here's my law firm page which I used an editor to create (so that's cheating, right).

I have a very rudimentary understanding and experience with HTML. I am on the MALL Web Committee so I hope to learn skills here I can use right away  :-)