Monthly Archives: November 2016

I am doing a report on the user ability of my hometown’s website, Cleveland, Ohio. I already knew that this website was not very user friendly based on the congestion of the home page, the lacking of a footer on the home page, and the random videos and advertisements that would show up when moving around the site.

I ran this website through WAVE in order to receive a full accessibility report on the website,  and I was not surprised by what I found. The website has many many user ability errors.

To be exact… 47 Errors, 49 Alerts, 17 Features, 120 Structural Elements, 9 HTML5 and ARIA, and 87 Contrast Errors. Most of these errors and alerts were due to missing alternate text, or redundant titles and links. The report also mentioned that the home page skipped a heading level completely.

47 Errors and 87 Contrast Errors just on the main home page of the site. I think it is time for this website to get a user-ability update!

The website I chose to analyze is website for the company I work for called University Tees. We are a printing and design shop out of Cleveland, Ohio. University Tees has what they call “campus managers” on over 250 school campuses across the country and work with hundreds of Greek organizations on those campuses.

It is important that this  website work correctly because hundreds of people visit it every single day in order to get ideas for new designs, place an order request, or receive product information. If this website weren’t working correctly, University Tees could potentially lose a lot of their customers to other companies.

When I ran it through WAVE reporter, I was initially scared because there were so many red flags that seemed to show up. Once I took a closer look at what these red flags were, it made me feel better about the website and how it works. There were red flags because there were “buttons” that did not lead to anywhere. For example, there is a button that looks like a bird (the University Tees logo), but the button doesn’t take you anywhere. This may be confusing for customers, but it does not make their experience on the site any worse.

The errors are something that IT could work on to improve the overall accessibility of the site, but they are nothing that would effect the customers or anything the customer would probably even notice.