"For years, accessibility and usability have been considered optional improvements. Not anymore. Many countries across the globe are passing laws necessitating a global change in how we view accessibility and usability. Companies and websites have faced legal penalties for not making their sites accessible. The legal requirements in certain countries, or for certain types of websites, obligate many of us to not only be aware of accessibility and usability guidelines, but to actively pursue and conform to them.
Accessibility deals with ensuring that everyone can access your website, regardless of browser used or whether living with certain impairments or disabilities. Needless to say, accessibility is much more than caring for people with disabilities. It is about lowering the barriers for everyone accessing the Internet, about caring for people's needs and preferences, along with writing the best possible content.
As you can see, the step over to usability is quite natural. Usability takes over where accessibility ends. If accessibility is about enabling access to your site for everyone, usability is ensuring that everyone can navigate the site in an intuitive way. Usability is about making your quality content easy to find, about ease and flexibility of navigation, about simplicity and logic.
Accessibility and Usability are two topics not to be ignored or taken lightly. Legislation and the steady increase in public demand for a better web is, luckily, going to impact how we view marketing, site design, and ecommerce -- forever...."
No comments:
Post a Comment