TheAccessPond.com

Many times great effort and resource is put into making sure that a site is compliant with Section 508 or the WCAG requirements. All the ALT text is in place, input fields have labels, headings and page titles are used, etc. Everything is set and ready to go…at least from a technical standpoint.

What often gets overlooked is the usability of the site. No matter how ‘compliant’ your site is it can still be unusable or at least not as easy to use as you may think. How so?

Let me give you an example. I was recently in a meeting with a client who is a large scale e-retailer. Much discussion was going on about how the trailer videos for some of their products are not captioned and how this may expose them to litigation by groups such as the National Federation of the Blind (NFB).

This company is fully committed to making their site accessible and if they could not get captioned videos they were going to pull the videos from the site! This is very commendable and it is also very refreshing to see a company with that kind of commitment to accessibility. Unfortunately they had not given much thought to the usability of the site…at least from the accessible view.

After the discussion on video captioning was done I brought up the topic of usability. I was informed that their testing includes the use of JAWS to verify the pages. This again is very commendable. I don’t encounter too many companies that bother to test their sites with a screen reader! Unfortunately the testers making use of this technology are not really attuned on what to check for. They listen to make sure the screen reader is reading out the text and controls but never really ‘hear’ what is being conveyed.

To demonstrate I used this e-retailer’s main landing page and immediately found two issues that a focused usability test pass would have disclosed.

First, products were being displayed with two prices. The retail price formatted with strike through text and then the sales price in bold colored text like this:

$159.99
$99.99

When the screen reader rendered this part of the page the two prices were read equally. There was no indication, other than the visual formatting, to let the user know what the real price of the item was.

Second, an image was used to promote the pre-order of an upcoming release of a product. This simply was comprised of an image which visually provided all the information a user would need to know. Unfortunately the ALT text for this graphic link only said, “Preorder order it now.” This leaves the screen reader user wondering, “Preorder what now?!”

Granted these seem like issues that could easily be figured out by your typical screen reader user but why make the user figure things out? A good user experience means that the site is usable without the second guessing and extra effort needed to investigate what the content really means. This leads to a great user experience, a happy customer and ultimately repeat sales if you are an e-retailer.

Not only does usability lead to a great user experience it also means that you are essentially limiting your exposure to litigation. If an Assistive Technology user can easily access your site, find what they need and make a purchase or retrieve the information they are looking for then why would an organization like the NFB bother with targeting that site for a lawsuit?

I am not saying that ensuring your site is complaint with the standards is not important but it does underscore that usability should be just as important. It helps in making your users happy and in avoiding situations where litigation could become an issue.

If you are expending resources on being compliant do yourself a favor and include usability as part of your accessibility efforts. Should you need help in this area or require an outside consultant to provide this service feel free to contact me and I can point you in the right direction.

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