The WEB Book experiments in electronic textbook design

This paper describes a series of three evaluations of electronic textbooks on the Web, which focused on assessing how appearance and design can affect users' sense of engagement and directness with the material. The EBONI Project's methodology for evaluating electronic textbooks is outlined and each experiment is described, together with an analysis of results. Finally, some recommendations for successful design are suggested, based on an analysis of all experimental data. These recommendations underline the main findings of the evaluations: that users want some features of paper books to be preserved in the electronic medium, while also preferring electronic text to be written in a scannable style

Evaluating electronic textbooks : a methodology

EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface) [1] builds on the premise to emerge from the Visual Book [2] and WEB Book projects [3], that appearance is important in the design of electronic textbooks, and offers an evaluation model, or general methodology, from which ebook usability experiments in a range of areas can be extracted and remain comparable at a basic level. The methodology sets out options for selecting material, participants, tasks and techniques, which vary in cost and level of sophistication. Results from each study will feed into a set of best practice guidelines for producing electronic textbooks on the Web, reflecting the requirements of students and academics throughout the UK

How Well Do Ontario Library Web Sites Meet New Accessibility Requirements?

New changes to Ontario law will require library web sites to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). This study evaluates 64 Ontario university, college, and public library web sites to see how well they comply with WCAG 2.0 guidelines at present. An average of 14.75 accessibility problems were found per web page. The most common problems included invalid html, poor color contrast, incorrect form controls and labels, missing alt text, bad link text, improper use of headings, using html to format pages, using absolute units of measure, and issues with tables and embedded objects