Any errors or issues you find that you cannot address, please bring to the attention of the Web team at cofawebmaster@austin.utexas.edu.
Double Check
- the site for accuracy,
- correct grammar and spelling,
- consistent voice and tone,
- use of the brand and style guides for the university, college and department, and
- that it follows best writing for the Web practices.
Accessibility
Wave https://wave.webaim.org/ is an online accessibility validation tool. Automated tools, such as Wave, are not able to test all accessibility issues but they can tell you if basic errors, like missing alternate text, are detected. Review the site with these Easy Checks and trying some manual configurations to see if you can navigate the site with only the keyboard or using a screen reader, will be much better tests for accessibility. For a complete list see the Ohio State University Information Technology wiki.
Color and contrast
When you’re picking out colors to use on your website make sure that the contrast is high enough for most people. WebAIM has a color contrast checker and a link color contrast checker. Chrome Lens is a free add-on for the Chrome browser that allows you to view a webpage as a user with a visual impairment.
Broken Links
The W3C or World Wide Web Consortium is the group that writes the standards for coding websites. They provide a tool to check for broken links, https://validator.w3.org/checklink. Review Google Analytics to see where people, who end up with a Page Not Found error, came from.
Readability
The website, The Readability Test Tool allows you to enter a URL Web address and will take the text and give a score based on the most used readability indicators.
Browser & Device Testing
Check out your site with a browser emulator https://turbo.net/browsers or a mobile device emulator https://mobiletest.me/. You can use https://caniuse.com/ to see if the code used to build a website will work on different browsers or devices.
Interaction Design
Follow best practices from Google’s Material Design Blog .“Material is an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that support the best practices of user interface design…” They even have a Web designer application called Google Web Designer .
Heuristic Review
Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design article provides common sense tips for checking the usability of the website. Such as, “The design should speak the users’ language. ” and “Minimize the user’s memory load by making elements, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the interface to another.”Review your web content while considering the important points in this article.
Research and Analysis
If you are a website content editor you should be receiving a monthly report from Looker Studio, in your email inbox. If you are not, please let us know.
Usability Testing
It’s important for you to get feedback from visitors to your site. If there’s something that you want people to “get” or accomplish when visiting your site, ask a friend or family member to give it a try. If you want to get a bit more formal you can perform usability tests. Basically, you ask several people to try to accomplish several tasks on your site while you watch and they talk out-loud through their process. Watch this 24 minute video of Steve Krug demonstrating a usability test.
Card Sorting
Navigation and information architecture are an important part of having a usable site. You may want to perform a card sorting activity if your visitors are confused about what to click on.
Optimization
Google provides a tool called PageSpeed Insights that will let you know how well your page will load on mobile or desktop devices.
Code Validation
The W3C also has a validation tool that you can run any website through and quickly see if there are validation issues with the code, https://validator.w3.org/. You can use https://caniuse.com to see if the code used to build a website will work on different browsers or devices.
Security
For the college sites the Web team will have already sent them to the university Information Security office for review. For other sites simply send an email to security@utexas.edu asking for an assessment.
Learn More
For a pretty complete list of tools from the W3C visit, https://www.w3.org/developers/tools/.The developer website, Sitepoint has an excellent article, The Ultimate Testing Checklist.