Program Details
Sharon Trerise
Senior Extension Associate, Employment and Disability Institute, Cornell University
Evaluating Your Website for Usability and Accessibility
There are several approaches to evaluating your web content for accessibility. Few people realize how closely accessibility is linked to usability. By improving the accessibility of your pages, it will undoubtedly result in a more usable web page that will appeal to a broader audience. Keeping this in mind, the process of evaluating your web pages should not only include checking for valid HTML, alt tags, etc., but should also include an assessment of the layout, font and color choices and many other factors. These additional assessments can rarely be accomplished through automated checkers and must be done through a manual evaluation process.
The Employment and Disability Institute at Cornell used 4 different strategies to evaluate the accessibility and usability of a sample of community college websites, specifically looking at online admissions application systems. In this session, we will demonstrate some of the major accessibility and usability barriers that we encountered in this study and discuss some alternatives for improving your website based on our findings.
About Sharon Trerise
Sharon combines her technical expertise in computer technology and assistive technology with her interest in instructional design to create training programs to explain how to design or retrofit web pages, distance learning content and other educational technology to be accessible for students with disabilities. Before joining EDI in 2003, Sharon worked for 20 years in the technology field, providing a range of services from technical support and training to software development and network administration. Sharon’s varied work experiences include K12 and higher education institutions as well as Fortune 500 companies and non-profit organizations. She is currently working toward a masters degree in Instructional Design and Educational Technology and has completed additional course work in assistive technology and universal design.