My best piece of intellectual work was my involvement with a research project analyzing University web page accessibility. Throughout late 2006 and early 2007, I collaborated with iSchool PhD student Shaun Kane, iSchool Informatics student Jessie Shulman, and Computer Science and Engineering faculty Richard Ladner, researching and writing a paper on the accessibility of the web pages of notable Universities, which included evaluating the homepage of each university with various programs that check web pages for compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), as well as identifying other accessibility features not included in automatic evaluation tools, such as web accessibility policies of the universities and available alternate languages/text-only versions. While disability was our primary background and focus, our accessibility standards were broader and included features needed for other groups, such as people that do not speak the country's primary language. The paper, titled "A Web Accessibility Report Card for Top International University Web Sites", was accepted for the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A) in Banff, Canada and has been published in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library as proceedings for the conference.
At the beginning of the project, Kane, Shulman, and myself identified the top 100 rated universities in the world and decided how we would evaluate them. We ended up choosing three web accessibility programs to evaluate the homepages of the universities. I personally used the program Cynthia Says, recording the violations of each of the homepages. The results that I collected were combined with the results of another, similar, evaluation program with a similar scoring system, and various statistics were derived from the results. I also participated in the research and literature review of the subject of web accessibility as well as the writing and editing of the paper. This project was a great experience with creating and publishing scholarly work, getting an understanding of the time commitment creating a paper such as this requires, and learning what it takes to make web sites accessible.
Another piece of professional level work that I worked on was the Pacific Northwest Amateur Astronomy Thesaurus, which I created for my LIS 531 class project with other MLIS students Michael Adcock and Sonja Sutherland. My role was providing much of the creation of the classified schedule and organization, such as the facets and structuring of the thesaurus. I also created the first draft of the purpose of the thesaurus and how to use it. To create a thesaurus, we had to learn the ins-and-outs of faceted structures and how to make using and searching the thesaurus practical
This page was last updated on Saturday, 19-Apr-2008 17:28:24 PDT.
Created and maintained by Timothy Shockley