Site usability assessment  

In 2008 Tiaho Trust and Accessible.co.nz ran usability and accessibility studies to evaluate ASB Community Trust's website.

The accessibility results showed that the website made a good visual impression, navigation was consistent and text was scalable for low-vision users. However, there were some concerns and these issues were incorporated into a planned redesign of the site in late 2008.

To test usability, volunteers were given scenario tasks to complete and their actions were monitored to discover whether visitors found the site easy or difficult to use. This assessed the ease of finding information on the site.

Overall, the site again rated well, but some found the colour shading hard to differentiate, others found the font too small or needed help to navigate the site. There was also comment about the length of some pages, font scalability, a lack of usable results from the search engine and  a recommendation that the  news stories be filed alphabetically.

We shared the technical findings with our web design company, SparksInteractive, and asked them to bring the website up to  standard. Other recommendations are being worked through in the early part of 2009.

Our aim is to ensure the website is now easy for everyone in our community to use. If you  discover any problems, please let us know.

We would like to thank Tiaho Trust for providing this valuable assistance. We can recommend them to others wanting to make their sites more accessible. For more information on Tiaho Trust's work phone 0800 430 3406, or visit tiaho.org.nz