Achieve "justice for all" by applying the ATJ Technology Principles

THE POOR WILL ALWAYS BE WITH US
[SOURCE: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, AUTHOR: Steve Rendall and Neil deMause]

According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 37 million Americans ­one in eight ­lived below the federal poverty line in 2005, defined as an annual income of $19,971 for a family of four.

Poverty touches a far greater share of the population over the course of their lives: A 1997 study by University of Michigan economist Rebecca Blank found that one-third of all U.S. residents will experience government-defined poverty within a 13-year period.

The poorest age group is children, with more than one in six living in official poverty at any given time. Yet despite being an issue that directly or indirectly affects a huge chunk of the U.S. population, poverty and inequality receive astonishingly little coverage on nightly network newscasts. An exhaustive search of weeknight news broadcasts on CBS, NBC and ABC found that with rare exceptions, such as the aftermath of Katrina, poverty and the poor seldom even appear on the evening news -- and when they do, they are relegated mostly to merely speaking in platitudes about their hardships.

Read more at FAIR: Poverty Undercovered in Network News: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3172

The ATJ Web Development team conducted another usability test which gave some good feedback about this site and what can be improved. The development process of site, as well as the results from the final usability report conducted by the development team are available in the final report attached to this post.

You may have noticed a couple of changes on the web site. To increase usability we've modified the slogan of the web site to more closely coincide with exactly what ATJ Web does. We've also changed the color of the breadcrumbs so that they have better contrast with the typical browser UI. Users didn't notice the breadcrumbs due to the fact that the background color blended in with the colors of most web browser interfaces. We hope you find the changes more usable. Feel free to send us feed back through our Contact Page

To improve usability we've added some javascript that automatically adds an external link icon for any link that goes offsite. Example: link to Washington State Board Association.

We've moved the breadcrumbs (the trailing of links showing where you're located on the website) and the search bar to the top of the website UI. This mimicks Jakob Nielson's useit.com website and addresses two of the issues we uncovered during our first usability test. The first issue dealt with visibility: people had trouble reading the breadcrumbs. The second issue dealt with the search bar. Some users didn't even notice the search bar in its original location (above the navigation on the left side).