Missouri State University – Episode #191
Site Scores:
| Site | Visual | Information | Code | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Missouri State University | 95 | 78 | 97 | (270/300) 90% A- |
Today’s Tip:
Most institutions have multiple sites that students need to log in to on a routine basis. The course management software, email, student portal, etc. Although the primary audience for your homepage is prospective students, make sure to help your current students out by letting them log in from the homepage. One form to log in to any of your institution’s services is ideal. It will not only avoid confusion but will also drive traffic to your homepage. Who knows, glancing at the news and events each day may get them more involved.
Show Notes
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Tags: episode
September 21st, 2010 at 10:17 am
Great to see your review of Missouri’s site. I liked the home page center column news content section too! Looks like they replaced the home page photo with a video (unfortunately, no captions or transcript).
Excited to see they’re using HTML5, but wondering how Missouri web team is managing issues with screen readers and HTML5. Terrill Thompson has a great study he did in May 2010 on the results of screen readers support of HTML5. http://www.accessibleculture.org/research/html5-aria/
September 21st, 2010 at 10:23 am
Oops! The link I sent was to Jason Kiss’s review of HTML5 & screen readers. Terrill Thompson provided additional info on his testing of HTML5 and screen readers in the comments.
September 21st, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Yep, the only reason for the “warning” from the validator is to make the user aware that HTML5 validation is still “experimental.” It had nothing to do with the quality of the code underlying the site. I’m pretty darn impressed myself.
YSlow is pretty much just a checklist app. I like Google Page Speed. It’s pretty much just a checklist too, but it grades sites on each item. Last time I used YSlow it was more like pass/fail. Of course, if you wanna get serious about boosting performance you can run both. Web Page Test is also an awesome performance assessment tool. It’s in the cloud rather than browser based, which has pros and cons.
It’s interesting to me that Google’s recommendations don’t include CSS sprites, althoughtheydohave an entire section on reducing HTTP requests and round trip times. Scratch that. They do recommend sprites now but I promise they didn’t a month ago.September 23rd, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Google Page Speed was the tool of choice I used while developing the Missouri State homepage. Not only does the checklist come in handy, but the built in image, css and javascript compressors are excellent.
I’m working on a series of blog posts about what went into the development of the Missouri State redesign for those interested.
September 24th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
Derek,
Thanks for the Web Page Test link, that thing is awesome!
Chad,
Thanks for your amazing work! I need to catch up with your blog posts and I may be asking you a few questions about the project in the future if you don’t mind.
Deborah,
I am always envious of your accessibility knowledge and concern. Thanks for the articles, frankly I haven’t had the time to read up on the issues with ARIA and HTML5 with screen readers but will over the weekend.
September 25th, 2010 at 7:54 am
Nick: Feel free to ask away.
Deborah: Our video tab videos come from YouTube and we use their auto-captioning. It isn’t the best solution, but since those videos change weekly we do not have the resources to caption them all manually. Every time we change technologies it takes a while for screen readers and other accommodation software to catch up. With HTML5 some things should massively improve (nav tag should eventually make skip nav links obsolete), while on others we seem to be going backwards (video tag has no native captioning/transcript support).
September 25th, 2010 at 9:18 am
Thanks for the reply. I’ve captioned several of our college’s videos (before YouTube auto-captioning existed) and have a sense of the time involved with captioning. Are there any plans to add transcripts to the videos?
Just curious, have you had any reports of screen reader issues with HTML5?
September 25th, 2010 at 9:47 pm
We transcribe some of our videos.
We haven’t received a complaint about anything related to HTML5. I periodically check in with our accessibility lab to see if they hear of anything, but so far it has been very smooth.
September 28th, 2010 at 8:30 am
Just to follow up on Chad’s comments on accessibility . . . we are also making extra efforts now to include links to any transcripts that are available, including our iTunes U content. We also are replacing the auto YouTube captions with custom captions to ensure they are the best quality.
December 24th, 2010 at 3:50 am
Oops! The link I sent was to Jason Kiss’s review of HTML5 & screen readers. Terrill Thompson provided additional info on his testing of HTML5 and screen readers in the comments.