1. 1 No Accessibility without Usability? David Sloan Digital Media Access Group University of Dundee digital media access group

2. 2 Accessibility without usability is like… …a wheelchair ramp into a library where books are sorted by size. (and how steep is the ramp anyway?) But very easy to get fixated on chasing ‘Bobby compliance’

3. 3 Accessibility without Usability? Automatically generated Text-only sites –Hand coded Text only sites! Bobby approved…but 108 links on the Home page and no easy way to navigate through them Alternative text – see example….

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5. 5 but a blind person might hear… “ Link – Students & graduates” “Link – Youth Accounts” “Man standing on his head” “Link: Internet Banking Login” “Link: Bank of Scotland Information” …’accessible’ but usable?

6. 6 Usability defined Ease of learning Speed of task completion Low error rate Retention of knowledge over time User satisfaction Ben Shneiderman (1992)

7. 7 Legislation Section 508 specifically addresses web accessibility But legislation not prescriptive for web designers in many countries: –“…or provide a less favourable service” (UK’s Disability Discrimination Act) Difficult to equate this to a WCAG priority – so could this mean the UK’s DDA requires sites to be usable by disabled people?

8. 8 Usability for disabled users: examples Search facilities –Easy to find on every page –Logical design –Go button last in the tab order An accessibility statement that tells disabled users what you’ve done for them…and what you haven’t Intelligibility of information in audio –“eResources” spoken as “error sources”

9. 9 Know your end users What technologies/knowledge can you be confident they will have? Involve disabled users in evaluation and testing Find out what they tolerate... and what irritates them –WCAG Checkpoint 10.5: ”Until user agents…render adjacent links distinctly, include non-link, printable characters (surrounded by spaces) between adjacent links”10.5 But be aware of designing for one user’s idiosyncrasies: all blind people are not the same!

10. 10 Summary Usability is nothing without accessibility But accessibility without usability is nothing either “Disabled users don’t want accessibility, they want to shop at E-bay, rip off MP3s, pass their Accounting 101 course…”