Student Media wins website usability challenge

In honor of World Usability Day November 14, N.C. State’s IT Accessibility Office conducted a month-long accessibility challenge to see which university websites could correct the most usability errors. N.C. State Student Media, online at studentmedia.ncsu.edu, placed first in the 100-999 pages division by correcting 79.93% of the site’s usability errors.

Contest ratings were determined solely on automated accessibility tests based on a scan of the site on October 13 and the last scan request submitted by 11:59 p.m. on November 13.

A number of the Student Media’s 20,000+ usability errors were due to low contrast between the background and foreground colors on the site and images missing alternate text. Correcting these and other issues caused the site to increase its overall accessibility rank of 286 out of the university’s 420 scanned sites to 124.

“Websites are often not designed with visual or other impairments in mind,” said Jamie Lynn Gilbert, assistant director of Student Media. “This accessibility challenge is a great way to show you your site from a disabled user’s perspective and learn how with just a little work you can vastly improve his or her experience.” Gilbert and Technology Support Analyst Doug Flowers manage the department’s website.

The contest divided participants into three groups based on the number of pages within their site. Honorable mentions in the 100-999 pages division were the Department of Mathematics with 75.14% errors corrected and the Department of Horticulture Science with 68.36% errors corrected. The Office of Admissions placed first in the 1-99 pages division with 99.37% errors corrected and WolfWare was the winner in the 1000+ pages division with 89.91% errors corrected.

According to Greg Kraus, University IT accessibility coordinator, 416,196 accessibility errors were corrected during the accessibility challenge and 1,188,908 total accessibility errors have been corrected since the accessibility scan started in March 2013.