Usability vs. accessibility

Feb 22, 2006

Most people are not recognizing the possibilities of an accessible website. They do however see the benefits of usability. This is a start, because accessibility IS usability. Usability IS NOT accessibility. 

When developing a website, the customer would demand it to be usable but will give no instructions whether or not it to be accessible. The customer cannot see the benefits of accessibility, because if you sell bicycles you probably haven’t got any blind or handicapped customers. A blind man is not blind to the issue of accessibility on the web or anywhere else I presume. The project manager is locked down by deadlines and probably will give accessibility a very low priority.

As I wrote before, it is not that hard to make websites accessible, but maybe you have to sell accessibility as usability, because usability is understandable by almost anyone. This might give you the little extra time it takes to make the website accessible and raise the overall quality of the website.

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Comments (2) -

Pelle
Pelle
2/22/2006 12:11:04 PM #

In order to complicate just a little bit more (isn't that what I'm do for a living?): Maybe you should differentiate between learnability and usability.

Very often I hear my customers taking about "usability", when they actually mean "learnability" as in how easy is it to learn how to navigate the site or something similar.

This is - off course - very important but does not cope with handling different tasks, which is usability.

One more thing to make life complicated, but it is hard to discuss issues we have no proper words for ;)

http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/Usability%20101:%20Learnability

Mads Kristensen
Mads Kristensen
2/22/2006 3:16:59 PM #

Pelle, you talk of usability and learnability as if they where two different things. Learnability IS usability but not the other way around. It is more of a subset of usability. Grantet, usability is a very vague word in this context, because it can mean everything and nothing. Learnability would many times be a better word to use when describing usability to outsiders, but my point remains the same.

Learnability vs. usability is merely retoric to some. As a programmer, the two things are miles apart. Learnability always comes down to the design of the interface and the functionality, and is therefore not interesting for a developer. Usability is however, because you can implement it directly in the code.

To put it simple: I, as a programmer, do not want to be bothered with learnability. It is a job for the designers. That I can't keep my mouth shut about it, is a different thing. Accessibility as being part of the usability is important to me as a developer however.

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Mads Kristensen

Mads Kristensen
Program Manager at the Microsoft Web Platform team and founder of BlogEngine.NET.

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The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer’s view in any way.