Designers often forget about making the site a pleasurable browsing experience.The focus on getting websites to adhere to W3C standards of accessibility means sites are coded and recoded to adhere. And all too often you end up with sites that have great accessibility and are no fun at all to browse. Accessibility becomes too much of a focus. It should be an aim of web design, but it should never be the focus. Remember, you want people to visit your web sites, stay on them, and maybe read a few things!
Some basic points to take into account when considering the usability of a page;
Scannable Text
Jacob Nielsen’s research on Reading on the Web remains true. People scan websites, they don’t read them. So make your text scannable – use short paragraphs, use bold text to highlight, use lists.
Clear Navigation
You’ve got an “accessible” web page with 100 links on the first page. Visitors have no idea where to go. Use seven main navigation links, maximum. Having cited Jacob Nielsen above, I’ll cite him again. Despite the entire focus of www.useit.com, it breaks this rule.
How Deep Is Your Site?
Hopefully not too deep. I don’t want to keep clicking links down to the sixth or seventh level of a site to find what I want. Let me paddle, not deep sea dive.
I Can’t Find What I’m Looking For
I can’t find what I want on your site instantly. If you don’t have a clear search option available, then I’ll get impatient and leave (I am a web user, after all!).
That’s Not Fully Accessible, Should I Lose It?
All the other pages on Fog of Eternity are validated by W3C and are fully accessible. Which page fails? The blog ones. And that’s because using Blogger I don’t have full control over the code they generate. But would this site’s value be increased if I removed the blog – I don’t think so. Here usability comes in direct conflict with formal accessibility standards, and I’ve gone for usability.
One excellent tool to use for examining wider usability as well as accessibility is WebXACT, which will provide you with feedback on your site not only in terms of coding issues but also quality of spelling, broken links, and issues highlighted above such as navigation depth.
The University of Illinois also looks at something called “functional accessibility” and has an Functional Accessibility Evaluator. This looks at some wider issues than the W3C code validation (I find their ‘Navigation and Orientation’ section very useful). Might surprise you to know that for despite its failure of code validation according to the W3C validator, this blog page scores more highly than www.w3.org and www.useit.com.
These tools are useful for developing a wider view of accessibility to include usability too. But they are only tools and they can only look at a site based on very specific technical guidelines. Usability is often more of a judgment call, though there are obviously good practice methods such as those highlighted above. Try and put yourself in the place of an Internet novice visiting your site for the first time, or even better, find an Internet novice who’ll test your site for you. Then you’ll have a far better idea of usability than any automated evaluation service will ever give you.
Of course we should still aim to make our sites adhere to accessibility standards. But before you get too bogged down in satisfying a set of standards and validation by a computer program, remember that the Internet is there for people to use. Make it easy for them to do so on a human level, as well as a technical one.