Roxy

Usability and accessibility. You are probably wondering what this could mean for you and how it can help your site. Below I have explained the very basics of these terms and how they can help not only you and your website, but also visitors to your website.

What is Usability?

Usability is the practice of having a clear structure of your website, so that when someone visits it, they know how to get around easily without having to click a hundred and one buttons.

How Do I Make my Site Usable?

1. Navigation - Make sure that your navigation at all times are in clear and easy to see/access locations. Having a header and footer navigation are a plus, while having sub-navigation on the side is a bonus.

2. Sitemap - Creating a sitemap of your website's pages is ideal for those who have large sites and a lot of different ways to get to one page. This will help the user easily locate the pages they want to see rather then clicking around and hoping to find it.

3. Color Contrast - Make sure that the colors for links and simple text are different from each other so that the user can easily tell the difference. Also having an active, hover, and visited link colors different from each other is a major plus. This helps the user know when they visited a page and helps tell the difference between a link and text.

What is Accessibility?

Accessibility basically means having your site be accessible to anyone on the web even if they have a disability. This can also benefit to those without a disability such as a broken arm, slow connection speed, or issues due to aging.

How Do I Make my Site More Accessible to Anyone?

1. Access Keys - Creating access keys to important pages within your website is a key feature for those who have trouble reading text on a website. Most users who have a vision impaired disability are taught how to use access keys on daily basis, so they are going to assume its not different on the web.

2. More Text, Less Images! - This can apply to people who have either a vision or hearing disability. With vision, user are more likely to have a text reading software on their computer, that reads out the text on a page out to them. If your site is made in Flash or with Javascript, you're basically restricting your website to people with perfect vision and hearing. In a way going against Section 508 (The Rehabilitation Act Amendments)
Is it fair to let some people view your site and not others? There is a way to go around this and that would be added the alt tag to images and animations explaining what they are doing.

3. Use Valid Coding - Create your website with organization, use headings and list tags properly. Navigation should always be first before content for easy finding. Try to avoid using phrases for links like "click here", be more specific and close to the link's page as possible.


In the end, implementing usability and accessibility into your website can help you generate traffic from all over and by who ever. Not only that but you can proudly say that your website is user-friendly! As an added bonus this can also help your ranking within search engines, since robots crawl text more so then images. Think about that when creating your next website!

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Roxanne


Urban Roxy -Personal Blog
SH63 - the best darn shared server!

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Progressive enhancement/degradable scripting solves that problem, FYI.