1. Conduct a usability test on your website:

The website is very simple as it was created for the sole purpose of hosting genre and application analysis journals comprised of mostly text and occasional images.

Going to the home page there is only a table of links in the middle of the page. There are two clearly labeled columns, “Genre Analysis Journal” and “Application Analysis Journal”. there are links in the columns that lead to journal posts that are titled with the week they were posted and the dates for those weeks.

On the journal pages, there are two things. A ‘picture’ of a house in the top left and a white text box in the middle of the page that contains that week’s journal’s text and images. When hovering over the house, the mouse changes to inform the user that it is a button. When pressed it takes the user back to the home page.

The usability seems pretty straight forward as not much happens and there aren’t many pages to navigate to.

On the accessibility side I tested or went over several things. The guide said I needed to have alt text for all images. At the time, none of the images had alt text. Next was good contrast between the contents of the page and the background. Using this site as suggested, all text and images, includeing the blue links that turn purple after being used, were AAA conformant. The next thing was to not rely on colors so that the page is accessible to colorblind people. nothing on the site relies on color. The guide said to use labels with form fields. There are no form fields, so no need to worry. Next was to use proper html tags and structure. This is to help screen readers be able to go through the page properly or allow users to skip through and find information they need. It says I should be using <h1-h6> or header tags, but my site is currently just using <p> or paragraph tags as I haven’t had a need to use different headers yet. Next it talked about resizable text. The text on my site is currently not resizable. Lastly was to support keyboard navigation so people who can’t use a mouse can still navigate the site. The site can be navigated completely with a keyboard by using the tab key and PgUp/PgDn keys.

This concludes the usability testing. I had gone through and tested my site myself.

2. Analyze your website based on Jake Nielsen’s Heuristics and also consider how it measures against accessibility standards.

Visibility of system status: the only thing on the pages is text, so there is no reason to inform users about what is happening.

Match between system and the real world: my site was made for students and instructors in English 212, so most of what I wrote was made using language this audience could understand.

User control and freedom: the only thing a user can do is press on a link that sends them to a specified journal entry or while in a journal entry, press on a button that sends them back to the home page.

Consistency and standards: there were a few cases in which two different words were used to, that ended up meaning the same thing

Error prevention: I don’t think anything is set up in a way that an error could occur, so there are no error prevention measures on the website.

Recognition rather than recall: I do not think this applies.

Flexibility and efficiency of use: nothing on the site needs accelerated.

Aesthetic and minimalist design: This site is super minimalistic. There is pretty much no content on the page other than the information the user would be looking for.

Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: There are no error messages set up for any part of the site. Because the site is so minimalistic, I would not think it possible for an error to occur.

Help and documentation: The site does not have any documentation or any other source to help the user use or navigate the site. The site is very simple and of the few options for things a user could do on the site, every option is visibly present on the screen.

The biggest changes I could make to the site to improve usability and accessibility would be to add alt-text to images, add proper html tags and structure for my text so they can be properly read by a screen reader, and make the text resizable.