Accessibility and website usability

To maximize your potential in website development, you should know the following aspects by heart.

* Usability. This is actually one of the very important aspects that you need to master in website development.

But what exactly is this?

This actually pertains to that particular characteristic of a website that makes it user-friendly and simple to use.

What Internet user would want to visit a website that is difficult to navigate, right? Thus, as a web developer, you should make your website usable for your visitors.

* Accessibility. This concept is also associated with usability. How else can a website be usable if it is not accessible in the first place?

Thus, you should take the certain measures to provide your website fresh content that is readily available to all sorts of people visiting.

Quite a large portion of the American society actually possesses some form of disability, which makes Internet usage for these people even harder.

In a group of five Americans, there is actually one who is disable, and the total figure can sum up to roughly 30 million.

Moreover, you just cannot expect this figure to start decreasing anytime soon because many people are entering their senior so this figure will inevitably increase still.

So many people all over the world are calling for website development to adopt a universal design approach.

This way, web developers would have a universal method of producing web content that can accommodate all sorts of users.

This scheme would include the following features:

• Access for disabled citizens


• Localization


• Customization


• Provision of applications that are inter-operable

There are actually recommendations prepared by the Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C towards the improvement of a website's accessibility when it comes to web content.

The following are the recommendations, as included in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

1. Present options to audio-visual content.

Not all Internet users are equipped with the same browsers and programs needed to access audio-visual content. Thus, you should provide alternatives.

2. Website developers should not base their designs on just color.

There are people who are afflicted with color differentiation impairment, so color should not be the basis of website development.

Make color coded charts easier to understand and decipher, and implement the needed contrast between colors.

3. Clarify your use of the natural language.

It is important to identify the language deemed dominant so that changes in the natural language can be marked accordingly.

4. Be wary of using time-sensitive content.

Marquee texts can be pleasing to the eye, but for people who have cognitive and visual impairments, this can be troubling. Thus, it is better to avoid this type of content.

5. Make sure embedded user interfaces are accessible.

It is fine for your website to contain objects that have their own interfaces. Just make sure all of these are accessible to the users.

6. Provide apt context information and orientation.

As a web developer, you should guide your visitors on how they can access information from your website.

This way, you make your information more accessible to all of your visitors, even those who have cognitive impairments.