Research Reports

AN ACCESSIBILITY AND USABILITY EVALUATION OF THE QUISP II APPLICATION

Lawrence A. Malakhoff

KEY WORDS: accessibility, QUISP II, Internet, screen-reader, Federal regulations, user-interface evaluation

ABSTRACT

The U. S. Census Bureau needs to monitor the quality control (QC) status of official Census Bureau forms and letters for the Decennial Census and other surveys it administers. For monitoring purposes, inspectors can retrieve a graphic chart containing QC details about a document using the Quality Information for Successful Printing (QUISP) II application. For all users to have access to the QUISP II application, it must conform to Federal accessibility regulations. According to the Federal regulations, computer users who have visual and/or other disabilities are entitled to have the same access as users who do not currently have any disabilities. The application must conform to the Federal regulations and the Census Bureau’s IT Standard 15.0.2 to be accessible. Normally, accessibility testing is performed using a screen reader. However, the application requires the user to have normal vision to be able to view form images, so a screen reader was not used for testing. For the purpose of this report, an item is judged to be accessible (compliant with the regulations) if it can be accessed by keyboard commands. To assess the compliance of the QUISP II application prototype, the present evaluation was performed in January 2008. The evaluation revealed, for example, that color is used by itself to distinguish between red, yellow, and green status lights and when there are no defects the stoplight graphic still shows a red light incorrectly indicating defects. These omissions violate the Federal regulations. This report uses screen shots to illustrate how compliance with Federal regulations can be accomplished, and it includes recommendations to improve the accessibility and usability of the QUISP II user interface.

CITATION:

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Research Division

Created: August 7, 2008
Last revised: August 4, 2008