POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENTS FOR THE COLLEGE’S WEBSITE
Introduction
Estimated Principal, I write you this proposal to express my concerns about the accessibility of our college’s website to foreign students and suggest the solutions I have encountered in other analogous websites, hoping to help resolve this issue.
I have personally dealt with accessibilities problems in my first months here, and having met others who had similar uneasiness with the site, I decided to search for possible solutions.
The Issues
The obstacles in the website can be summed up in mainly three:
- The absence of a complete English version,
- The absence of a clear structure, that makes the navigation harder.
- The presence, or better, the absence of some pages (404 errors are common).
Possible Solutions
I understand most professors do not know any foreign language or are not confident enough to translate their material in English.
In other universities this has been dealt by allowing the professors to offer extra points in the exam to students willing to translate the course material in English, confronting afterwards the translation and choosing the ones that better with the original.
This would not grand a complete English version, but would certainly help cover a larger portion of the website.
A clear structure would require a large work of restructure for the website, which I understand is hardly feasible.
An idea could be to offer a site-map, a page that contains an ordered structure of the links of the website, to help the navigation.
For the missing pages, instead, tools exist to be notified and remove or update those sections.
I understand this should be delegated to the authors of those sections, so a faster and easier solution could be to use tools to signal the faulty links to the user, to ease the navigation.
Conclusion
Hoping to have offered a clear idea of both the issues and the possible solutions,
Best Regards,
A. Calligari