Accessibility Testing Report

Hannah Bryant
Bourbon & Boots Little Rock, Arkansas intern@bourbonandboots.com

Abstract This test was conducted primarily to identify any issues with accessibility and/or navigability for low-vision and/ or color-blind users within the new version of the Bourbon & Boots website. During the test, the participant: Answered questions pertaining to their own background information. Read a short user profile defining the target user. Completed several model tasks. Answered questions regarding overall experience. These questions and tasks covered several aspects of the site, including the home page, product pages, and story pages. While the participant seemed to have an overall positive experience while on the site, a few issues arose regarding its accessibility.
Keywordsaccessibility; navigation; readability testing; low-vision users;

It is worth noting here a few challenges presented by the participant. Ideally, a group of participants would have been tested. Beyond this, however, are a couple more potential setbacks presented by this particular participant. The extent of this participants vision issues were easily fixed with corrective lenses. A user profile was provided to help the participant understand the target audience of these tests, but we must keep in mind this goes only so far. B. What Including five post-questions, the participant was presented a total of fifteen questions and tasks at random. Each of the tasks tested a different aspect of visibility and/or accessibility within the site. The variety ranged from issues concerning color and font to those focused on the interface. The questions varied somewhat in nature. They asked the participant to analyze the dependency on the meaning of color in the site, determine the readability based on the font, color, and language choices, and to walk decide on the effectiveness of the navigation and organization of the site. Each one plays a role in the overall idea of accessibility. II. FINDINGS

I.

METHODOLOGY

A. Who In this particular test, one participant aided in testing the site. Following are the characteristics.
TABLE I. USER DEMOGRAPHICS

Overall, the user seemed to have few problems with the accessibility of the site. However, the problems that did arise were fairly crucial in nature. The user decided there are alternate ways of determining the division of sections; color was not the only way this was defined. However, it was pointed out that a color-blind user would not be able to determine the color of each product; only those products with color variations had any sort of reference to the color within the copy. Currently, the site depends entirely on the color of the pictures for this information for all other products. Part of the accessibility test included asking the participant to read through a story. The participant was asked to think about two elements while reading through the text: readability based on design and readability based on language. Overall, the participant found the language of the text to be relatable. The font, however, posed a problem. The participant described the thin text on the white background as tough to read.

Gender Age Occupation Hours spent online each week Frequency of online shopping
Fig. 1. Relevant user demographics.

2 Male 20 Tutor 10 Never

Fig. 5. The categories have been pushed to the very bottom of the homepage.

Fig. 2. The participant found the thin text on the white background hard to read.

A last, less significant issue the participant offered as an observation concerned the icons used for stories. While the icons for the products and vendors made sense, he admitted to having not immediately understood the book icon for stories. III. RECOMMENDATIONS From these usability tests, I have developed four recommendations for development. Each of these recommendations provides an element of accessibility for users with low vision and/or color-blindness. 1) Include color descriptions as a part of normal product page creation. This can be done in a way that will not compromise the integrity of the sites voice. 2) Change the design of the text in the product and story pages to a stronger, darker font. When the participant brought this particular issue to light, I had him look at the text on the homepage. This text, he said, is much easier to read. Even the text in the Trending bar on the left-hand side of the screen was judged as more readable. We could easily apply this same style to all prodcut and story pages. 3) Create a hierarchy of information within the story and product headings. For example, the Read section can be broken down into sections such as: Literature Travel Food Music Southernisms This would help users more easily navigate each category. Low-vision users often have to utilize techniques such as enlarging the page in order to more easily read. This makes understanding navigation within the site harder to understand. Providing more navigation features will enhance this for users. 4) Moving forward, it is crucial we find a way to keep the vital information present for users who enlarge the page. At the very least, category headings need to be prominently displayed so users can still easily navigate to the appropriate sections of the site.

After perusing the Read section for a small amount of time, the participant encountered another issue in this area. After commenting on a few articles he found particularly interesting, he pointed out he felt the section needed something to help narrow down the results. In other words, he couldnt see the correlation between many of the articles and did not understand why they would be in the same category. A final, glaring problem the user encountered involved the act of enlarging the page to 200%. Once the participant enlarged the page, he quickly found information was lost. Users lose the ability to scroll from side to side and lose links. On top of this, most of the relevant information to shopping, such as category headings, moves to the bottom. In the words of the participant, enlarging the page makes it a lot easier to read but a lot harder to shop. Basically, the essential information becomes much harder to find.

Fig. 3. Visibility of homepage at default zoom.

Fig. 4. When users zoom to 200% all of the headings disappear from the top.