Accessibility Report (Volunteer)
Lakes Area Music Foundation is a non-profit organization that arranges music scene in central Minnesota. This organization was seeking a website audit to enhance the accessibility of their website.
Background
"Website Audit Needed"
The Lakes Area Music Foundation needed an audit on their website so that they could get ready for their new season of the festival. I went through their website and made design suggestions. But the design audit suggestions were made through text so that the organization’s website owner could update audited criteria based on their needs and capabilities.
Accessibility Report
While keeping in mind of the WCAG Guidelines, there were 3 main accessibility issues that were discovered during the audit
1. Not enough Color Contrast for Hover
The default color for hyperlinks were pink. But when the user hovers on the hyperlink with mouse, the font color changes to orange/red, which is not obvious to the user that hover is being made with their mouse.
Design Suggestion
If the text color of the hovered state could become a color other than orange (which makes harder to differentiate on dark background) would be helpful for the user to quickly distinguish
2. Social Icon intruding Page Content
The social media buttons that relate to the organization are laid out vertically on the left-hand side. While this would not have any problem for wider monitors, however, the user may not be able to fully view the content of the website due to the of the vertical social media button sets being sticked to the left side of the view.
Design Suggestion
The best idea to place the social media buttons are to place them in the footer.
3. Primary Button Contrast Issue
The website had its primary button colored in pink (hex code: #EF7BAC) with white text.
However, when I ran the contrast checker for the white (#FFFFF) text and pink background (#EF7BAC), it did not pass the WCAG standards for smaller text, larger text, and GUI components.
Design Suggestion
Thus, I suggested to have the darker pink for the background of the button
Final Thoughts
Through this volunteer experience I learned how to deliver website audit contents to the owner of the website. The content manager of the organization’s website wanted to have the contents ready that meets accessibility. Thus, I learned that sometimes minimum viable product is good enough depending on varying needs of businesses and organizations. I gained experience to provide short-term feedbacks