{
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    "title" : "User Experience Impossible: The Line Between Accessibility and Usability |Digital.gov",
    "description": "User Experience Impossible: The Line Between Accessibility and Usability",
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    {"title" :"User Experience Impossible: The Line Between Accessibility and Usability","summary" : "Bob goes to a popular federal government site, using his assistive technology, and starts reading a teaser for an article. Just below the teaser, there’s an embedded video on the page. He presses the tab key, trying to navigate to a link for the full article, but suddenly he’s trapped—he can’t tab past the video.","date" : "2014-11-17T10:00:39-04:00","date_modified" : "2024-04-02T09:45:13-04:00","authors" : {"angela-hooker" : "Angela Hooker"},"topics" : {
        
            "accessibility" : "Accessibility",
            "design" : "Design",
            "research" : "Research",
            "usability" : "Usability",
            "user-experience" : "User Experience"
            },"branch" : "cm-topics-button-component",
      "filename" :"2014-11-17-user-experience-impossible-the-line-between-accessibility-and-usability.md",
      
      "filepath" :"news/2014/11/2014-11-17-user-experience-impossible-the-line-between-accessibility-and-usability.md",
      "filepathURL" :"https://github.com/GSA/digitalgov.gov/blob/cm-topics-button-component/content/news/2014/11/2014-11-17-user-experience-impossible-the-line-between-accessibility-and-usability.md",
      "editpathURL" :"https://github.com/GSA/digitalgov.gov/edit/cm-topics-button-component/content/news/2014/11/2014-11-17-user-experience-impossible-the-line-between-accessibility-and-usability.md","slug" : "user-experience-impossible-the-line-between-accessibility-and-usability","url" : "/preview/gsa/digitalgov.gov/cm-topics-button-component/2014/11/17/user-experience-impossible-the-line-between-accessibility-and-usability/","content" :"\u003cdiv class=\"image\"\u003e\n  \u003cimg\n    src=\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/digitalgov/_legacy-img/2014/11/600-x-402-Internet-accessibility-concept-Federico-Caputo-Hemera-Thinkstock-100945139.jpg\"\n    alt=\"Internet accessibility concept\"/\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eBob goes to a popular federal government site, using his \u003ca href=\"https://www.disability.gov/resource/disability-govs-guide-assistive-technology/\"\u003eassistive technology\u003c/a\u003e, and starts reading a teaser for an article. Just below the teaser, there’s an embedded video on the page. He presses the tab key, trying to navigate to a link for the full article, but suddenly he’s trapped—he can’t tab past the video. He’s stuck, and he can’t access the content. Frustrated, Bob leaves the site.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWould you call this a bad user experience? I sure would, but I’d say that it’s even more than that. Let’s explore why.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePeople often argue whether accessibility is related to usability. I’d say that they are close. In fact, they should be married, because they complement one another, but they’re not the same thing. Some people might even say that accessibility is usability for people with disabilities, but it’s oh, so much more.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAccording to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C-WAI), accessibility is the means through which “… people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and they can contribute to the Web.” And the International Standards Organization’s standard ISO9241 defines usability as the “… effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments.”\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAccessibility is a benchmark of the quality of our users’ experiences. The two are quite different by definition, but in practice, they’re still separate issues. Accessibility means that your audience can \u003cem\u003eget to\u003c/em\u003e the content and message you want them to receive. It’s more than just user experience. Without accessibility, the user experience—good or bad—\u003cem\u003ecan’t even happen\u003c/em\u003e. So, as the saying goes, “usability depends on accessibility.”\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJcswWmmAw\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"image\"\u003e\n  \u003cimg\n    src=\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/digitalgov/_legacy-img/2014/11/250-x-150-How-to-Use-Assistive-Technology-to-Comply-with-Section-508-with-subtitles-turned-on.jpg\"\n    alt=\"A screen capture of our webinar, How to Use Assistive Technology to Comply with Section 508, as seen on YouTube with the subtitles turned on.\"/\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\n\u003c/a\u003eEven people who don’t have disabilities can’t access digital media if there are barriers to content. What sort of barriers exist for people without disabilities? Here are two examples:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOur friend Bob’s brother, Todd, is waiting for his flight in Oakland, and he’s on his way to meet some new clients. He needs to research loans for this last minute meeting, and he’d like to watch a video on the Small Business Administration’s site or its YouTube channel. Unfortunately, it’s so noisy in the waiting area that he can’t hear the video, and he left his earbuds in his gym bag at home. How can he get the content from the video that he can’t hear?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBob and Todd’s sister, Amanda, is somewhat distracted at the moment. While watching her kids play soccer in the park, she’s using her tablet to order a consumer information catalogue. Unfortunately, the site’s order form has placeholder text within each form field where she needs to input her name and address. In between glances at her children, when she touches each field to input her information, she forgets what the placeholders say since they disappear when she touches the fields. Over and over, Amanda touches in and out of the form fields to find what she’s supposed to input. What should have been a three-minute task progresses to 15 minutes before she gives up and decides to watch the game—not having ordered the publication.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese two examples are common occurrences. Fortunately for Todd, the Small Business Administration rightly captions their videos, so he can read the captions and access the info for his meeting. Instead of the random site she was on before, Amanda can order the \u003ca href=\"http://www.usa.gov/consumer-action-handbook/order-form.shtml\"\u003eConsumer Action Handbook\u003c/a\u003e from USA.gov where the order form has text labels outside the form fields. Amanda only has to look above each form field to determine what she needs to input in it. Accessibility for the win!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe, in government, must remember that our users are entitled to receive government information. We must do all we can to provide that information and \u003cem\u003eenable\u003c/em\u003e people \u003cem\u003eto even have\u003c/em\u003e a user experience. In the end, it all goes back to my favorite saying: Access for all…or as many as possible. Usability can follow afterward, and then you can measure the user experience.\u003c/p\u003e\n"}
  ]
}