Accessibility Audit

Is the NIC learn digital design & development page up meeting accessibility standards?

Yes, the learndigital website meets accessibility standards. The website is clean and straightforward, presenting enough- but not too much- information to the reader. In general, the website is accessible to a wide variety of audience, including those with disabilities. However, there are a few issues of varying severity which will be addressed throughout this evaluation.

                                            Perceivability:

• +Colors still work well with different screen brightness, temperature, etc.
• ~Colors can sometimes be quite high in contrast and saturation
• -Missing alt texts for the student hero header and the learndigital world map.
• -Get In Touch submission notification is easy to miss

Perceivability Score: 3.5/5

                                            Operability:

• -All of the nice buttons, like Apply, Learn More, Get Started, and Get In Touch don’t seem to have alt-text.
• -Other images have poor alt-text descriptions.
• ~All links bring users to the same form

Operability Score: 3.5/5

                                            Understandability:

• +Larger headers make glancing through the site easy, whilst still informing the user of important info
• +Blocks under headers contain concise information
• +Understandable, simple, and straight-forward content
• -The NIC Community section promises hands-on access to faculty. It is unclear whether the program is currently online or in class, an important factor for international students.

Understandability Score: 4/5

                                            Robustness:

• +Website scales incredibly well, and handles many devices flawlessly.
• +Passed all tests of robustness. The website has good HTML!
• -Scripting was longer to load in tests
• ~Requires several MB of memory, which is negligible.

Robustness Score: 4/5

                                            Total Accessibility Score:
                                                           15/20

                                            Accessibility challenge Severity:
                                                           4/5

Overall many of the issues were very minor, however some of the alt-text related problems, particularly related to the buttons, could make the site very difficult if not unusable for users reliant upon screen readers.