What is Black Box? A Black Box is a device, whose working is not understood, or is not accessible to the user. According to Edward Tenner, writing in The Washington Post, the first black box found was a gun sight, which was carried on World War II Flying Fortresses. It was a hidden component, which corrected for environmental variables like wind speed. To avoid getting the site affected by Black Box, one needs to conduct test in advance. The best way to test a website for Black Box is by considering the site as totally black. And than, one can start testing in the following three areas: text, links and pictures.
Text – one should treat the entire page text as a document. The test methods should be than applied on the whole document for validity. After this one can examine and confirm the stage of the reader, content, terminology, and subject material. It’s also important to ensure the accuracy of the above details. Spellings are equally important. It is advisable that one should not rely on the spell checker. Only regular text is checked by the spell checker. However, it doesn’t check the text, which is included in the pictures, forms, rolling box etc. If one has an e-mail address, contact number, postal code or any other kind of contact details, than one should make sure that they are also checked for their correctness. It is vital to check the title of the web page. The ALT text is the pop-up description of the information of the image. One needs to ensure that the ALT text is also accurate. Besides this it is advisable to increase the fond size of the web browser window. This can help to identify the possible text layout problems.
Links – Links are the attachments on a site. They can be in form of text or the images. It is very necessary to check that the links connected are not broken. Generally, the hyperlinks are underlined. One can have an option of auto fill up, in case of open link of an e-mail message. One should take care that no isolated page is left to link back.
Pictures – it is important that all the images are loaded and displayed correctly.
