How do usability and accessibility relate in a digital context?

If you work on IT, you certainly have heard the word “usability” around, even if you are not a digital designer. Summarizing, a product with good usability is one that is easy to use. Digital accessibility, however, is a term that is emerging in IT communities and it’s still not very well understood or appreciated. Many people consider accessibility as an “extra feature”, but I am here to show you how considering good usability whilst including accessibility guidelines improves the experience for your users and therefore provides a competitive advantage for your product or company.  

What is usability?

Usability is a scale that evaluates how well a specific user can interact with a product in a specific context. To present good usability, a product should be:  

1. Easy to learn how to use: Can I quickly learn how to do it and recognize the path next time?   

2. Easy to use: Can I get what I want to do done?  

3. Pleasant to use: Am I enjoying this experience?  

4. Trustworthy: Am I confident enough to use it without making mistakes, and, if I do, can I repair them?  

You may have noticed that these are all qualitative values. When you ask, “is my product usable?” you can never expect to hear “yes” or “no” – it will always be a scale depending on people and context (place, time, user and business goal, and more). An app or website that is usable for me might not be usable for you or others, either because we have a different idea of what is USEFUL or because we work on different mental models.

Why is usability important for my product?

Consider you are looking for a new wireless keyboard online, and you find this new tech store. If you can’t find how to search for the model you want (it’s not easy to learn how to use), you will probably leave the website. If you can’t find the price for an item (it’s not easy to use), you will probably leave. If infinite ads pop on your screen (it’s not pleasant to use), you will probably leave. After all, there are so many other online stores you can go to buy that keyboard, and you cannot waste your time trying to figure out how to use that unusable website.   

Usability is in the information architecture, the interface, and the visual and written language of websites, and digital applications are one of the main factors responsible for getting people to know, use and keep using your digital product.   

Where usability meets accessibility

You might be familiar with the concept of accessibility: making places, activities, and information available for people with disabilities, like providing ramps instead of stairs, tactile information plates, wider doorways, and so on. We see all those improvements in the physical world, but it is much less obvious for people who do not use accessibility resources how it works in the digital context. Even though around 1 billion people worldwide experience some kind of disability, this is still an underground subject in tech communities.    

This is why the W3C has put together a series of guidelines to help make any website and app accessible for as many people as possible. You can view all those rules on their website by clicking here. At first glance, it seems like a lot of work, but once you realize following those rules improves digital experiences not only for people who experience some kind of disability but for all audiences, you will be able to perceive that the accessibility guidelines are also usability good practices – and many huge companies have already started changing their digital experiences to meet the accessibility requirements. 

Imagine this: you are waiting at a doctor’s office. A baby is sleeping next to you, and some people talking on the other side of the room. There is this new video out by your favorite Youtuber, but you forgot your headphones at home. If this video is subtitled, you can still access the content without disturbing other people. If not, you won’t be able to hear what the person on film wants to say without being heavily judged by the other patients. In fact, Facebook says 85% of their video content is watched in silence, so this is not a matter of specific situations but true for most users.   

This data is what pushed forward one of the newest Instagram resources, the auto caption for IGTV videos (see how to set it on your profile here) and the Thread app, that allows you to automatically add subtitles to your stories as you talk. Knowing this, adding automatic subtitles is a business and usability obvious decision for Facebook, but this is one of the guidelines for accessibility to make the video content available for those 446 million people with hearing disabilities worldwide.

What’s next?

I hope that this short post has shown you through only a few examples of how good usability and accessibility can be seen and used as a pair. Good usability has been known for years as one of the key elements to a successful product, but accessibility tends to only be considered when a lawsuit might be involved. If you consider accessibility in your digital product, you will be able to provide access to millions of people who are not considered by your company’s contestants. This means that making your application accessible, is not only a measure of inclusion, it also provides a competitive advantage for your product.  

Unfortunately, it is not possible to cover all accessibility guidelines in this post and show you how they improve usability for all users, but if you want to learn more, consider checking these other content sources and keep learning! 

Curated content about accessibility 

Accessibility guidelines for web and mobile 
Web 4 All conference 
Web para todos (Portuguese) 
Acessibilida.de (Portuguese, but the content hub contains loads of content in english)  
Test your web application on Chrome as a person with disability

Featured Image by UX Indonesia on Unsplash.