Two Birds, One Stone

In our digital marketing class we talked about usability as a dimension for evaluating a website. Our generated list included things like: cleanliness of design, ease of navigation, forms that don’t act hostilely towards the user, etc (on a related note, one thing that irritates me is when a mailing address form asks me for my state/province before my country, but requires that I set my country in order to get the Canadian provinces to populate the list). One aspect of websites that is often overlooked is its accessibility. Accessibility addresses how accessible your website is to users of various abilities, or more clearly, of various disabilities. For example, users with color-blindness will have great difficulty accessing information in certain color combinations. A common “brick and mortar” analogy is increasing wheelchair accessibility to your place of business with the installation of wheelchair ramps. Why is this important? It’s not an insignificant demographic. A 2006 Stats Canada study found that over 800,000 Canadians identify themselves as having a visual disability (more stats on other disabilities can be found here: http://bit.ly/9yZgh7). This equates to just over 3% of the population. Certain industries and government websites are legislated to meet specific accessibility requirements. Additionally, adherence to accessibility guidelines such as those set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium tend to result in more standards based HTML which can improve cross browser/device usability. Proper accessibility techniques can result in better search placing by search engines like Google. Accessibility should be undertaken for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do as a compassionate human being, but it also has some beneficial side effects. So when you are conducting a website evaluation for your next project, don’t ignore accessibility.