Identities: Usability

After a couple of seminars on Usability and Accesibilty within the web, we were given a series of questions to answer and also to think about how certain things affect certain people.

Use of text equivalents (think about your experience with Lynx);
OK: You can navigate the site using Lynx fairly well and I could gather a rough outline as to what information it contained and what it was advertising

Ability to use the site without plugins (e.g. Flash) and Javascript. (Again, think about how easy/difficult it was to use the site in Lynx where these are not available);
Unusable: Although the site could be used in Lynx, the main purpose of the site was a lottery and to play the lottery you need Flash plugins installed and working as the numbers in which you picked were in a flash movie.

Ability to use the site with just the keyboard in Internet Explorer;
Poor/Unusable: The navigation links are fine when used with just a keyboard, but when moving on to the flash movie, some of the numbers are possible to select, not very nice when one of your numbers for the lottery happens to be one you can't choose!

Colour combinations used on the site (think about how the site looked to people with colour blindness);
OK: Generally, the site is usable for any type of colour blindness, there might be a problem for people with tritanope vision (a blue/yellow deficit), however this is very rare, the bright pinks might be a slight problem with visual impaired users.

Colour contrast of the site (think about how the site looked to people with age related visual degeneration);
Poor/Unusable: Because of the low contrast that the site will appear it will make it very hard for people to view the site as the colours that are used blend into each other far too much.

Ability to apply user settings to the site (think about how the site behaved when you tried to change the text size on the site, and the simulation of what happened when colour changes were applied);
Poor: Only some of the text [Navigation Links] changes size. This is because everything else in the site is embedded in a flash file and this isn't recognised as text and therefore doesn't change. This is similar with colour changes, because the site is mainly Flash files the colour scheme doesn't with these but only for the text and background of the main site.