Hard work pays off

Friday, October 26. 2007

This week I was honoured to be asked to present at the New Zealand Computer Society Student Research Contest in Wellington. The top three researchers from Computer Science and top 3 from Information Systems at Victoria University were asked.

There were 4 judges present from both industry and Government. Since my research has been primarily focussed on Government websites, I was a little worried about having a member of the E-government unit as a judge, as my research was all about the work they had done with the Standards, but I was to be pleasantly surprised.

In my presentation I detailed how blind people use websites, then went on to talk about openWolf and how I conducted my experiment, followed by the all-important results. I went on to win first place, which got me a nice cash prize and the ability to say that I won. It also meant than Computer Science took both the top spots, which should please a few people.

The E-government judge approached me afterwards, gave me his business card and said to contact him about incorporating my changes into the standards, which was the icing on the cake really.

It's nice to get some real recognition for my research and the chance to see my findings being used to improve the quality of Goverment websites. This only raises more questions about what I'll do next year.

Edit: I have been featured in a ComputerWorld article about the competition: Student winner exposes govt website shortcomings

Posted by Ben in Personal, Uni at 03:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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About Crimson

Ben Bradshaw is a 22 year old geek whose interests include web design, development and accessibility.

He has worked for MED, SSC and currently works for Catalyst IT. He has researched website accessibility for sight impaired and blind users as part of his honours study. In his spare time he likes to DJ.