Usability and Accessibility Flashcards
What is usability?
Usability determines how easy a design’s user interface is to use and how functional a product or design is.
The effectiveness of the user interface, or fitness for purpose, and how much time goes into using the interface according to the user are evaluated during usability testing.
What are commonalities of usability and accessibility?
The components used for evaluating usability can also be applied to accessibility. Accessibility focuses on how usable and satisfying a product or service is to people with disabilities, including but not limited to people who use assistive technologies. In terms of usability, accessibility increases the chances of more people being able to use a product or design regardless of their abilities.
What are the differences between usability and accessibility?
Usability issues tend to affect every user, both users with disabilities and users without disabilities. All users face some difficulty using a product or service. Accessibility issues occur when people with disabilities encounter difficulties using or accessing a product or service.
There are also times when remediating accessibility issues may cause usability issues. For instance, if all images on a website are assigned very long text alternatives, the images may be accessible, but listening to long alternative text creates usability issues. There is a fine balance in ensuring that addressing accessibility issues does not cause usability issues and addressing usability issues does not create accessibility issues.
If navigating a website is unclear, or its structure is illogical, and extremely complex for all users, the issues the website has are.
Usability issues.
Buildings that provide ramps as an alternative for steps or have flat entryways resolve which type of an issue.
Accessibility issues.
