Topic > Importance of accessibility and usability

This document explains the distinction and overlaps between accessibility and usability and also strives to highlight the importance of maintaining a focus on accessibility and usability for people of different age groups. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Accessibility addresses discriminatory aspects related to equivalent user experience for people with disabilities, including people with different age groups or age-related disabilities. For the web, accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with websites and tools and that they can contribute equally and without barriers. Usability and user experience design is about designing effective, efficient, and satisfying products. Specifically, ISO defines usability as “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified objectives effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily in a specified context of use. Guidelines for Different Age Groups A. General Public All fall under the general public scope. So, what defines it is the general psyche of the people. If we apply the principles of psychology to predict and explain how our customers think and act, we will obtain good web design. Behavior is heavily influenced by unconscious thinking, but is often more predictable than you might expect. Understanding the fundamentals of human cognition will help explain and anticipate user behavior. Therefore, the help is to design a website that is suitable for everyone. The important common aspects (all age groups) that you should always keep in mind, both of usability and accessibility in site design, are the following: Attention Visual perception Memory and knowledge Information retrieval strategies Mental models to predict interactions and outcomes Language Problem solving and decision making Emotionally driven behavior B. Children and adolescents Identify the applicable funding agency here. If there is none, delete this text box. Designing websites for children is typically based solely on folklore about how children are supposed to behave. The best indicator of how children use websites is the amount of online practice they have. Although many usability guidelines are the same as they were 9 years earlier, we found an important change since the first study: children today have much more experience using computers and the Internet. As a result, they aren't subject to many of the prevalent first-time user issues that we found in our first study. Nowadays, children are on the computer as soon as they can sit down, move the mouse or touch the screen. It is now common for a 7-year-old to be an experienced Internet user with several years of experience. Many of the basic rules for usable web design are the same for children and adults, although often with differences in degree. The most important finding in both new and old research is the need to target very narrow age groups when designing for children. In fact, there is no such thing as "designing for kids," defined as anyone between the ages of 3 and 12. At a minimum, you need to distinguish between young children (3–5), middle-class children (6–8), and older children (9–12). Each group has different behaviors, and users become substantially more web-savvy as they age. And these different needs go well beyond the obvious imperative to design differently for pre-readers, beginning readers, and readers.moderately experienced. To understand the expectations of a generation raised with technology and the Internet, we conducted empirical usability studies with real teens to identify specific guidelines on how to improve websites to meet teens' abilities and preferences. Our research disproves many stereotypes, including that teens: just want to have fun online with graphics and multimedia content; they are extremely tech-savvy; uses smartphones for everything and wants everything to be social. Although their specific tasks may differ from those of adults, teenagers are similar to adults in many ways: Both groups expect websites to be easy to use and to allow them to accomplish their tasks. Like adults, teenagers are goal-oriented and do not surf the web aimlessly; Website usability is therefore as important to them as to any other user group. Teens use the Internet from many devices in different environments. For our research we focused on web usability, mainly from desktop and laptop computers. We also looked at the usability of mobile websites and how teens use mobile devices. Even though teens spend endless time texting, using Facebook, etc., we didn't focus on that because our goal was to derive design guidelines for traditional websites, not help build the next Facebook.C . Senior CitizensThe human aging process begins when we turn 20; people in their forties already have poor enough vision to require slightly larger font sizes than more thoughtful designers in their twenties. Older people have become more adept at using the web. While we don't see much progress over time in the web skills of the mainstream public, seniors are a different matter. Unlike seniors a decade ago, today's seniors are more likely to have learned to use computers while still on the job. Older adults who learn from corporate training courses and peers are more likely to create strong mental models than older adults who have acquired computer skills after retirement. It is obviously important to recognize that young people also have physical and cognitive limitations. But, as the table clearly shows, these problems are much more serious for older users. The most important finding in both new and old research is the need to target very narrow age groups when designing for children. In fact, there is no such thing as "designing for kids," defined as anyone between the ages of 3 and 12. At a minimum, you need to distinguish between young children (3–5), middle-class children (6–8), and older children (9–12). Each group has different behaviors, and users become substantially more web-savvy as they age. And these different needs go well beyond the obvious imperative to design differently for pre-readers, beginning readers, and moderately proficient readers.D. Users with cognitive/learning disabilities In many ways, it is difficult to define when a page is accessible to users with cognitive disabilities. How simple is simple enough? For the most part, the cognitive accessibility of the web is one of those "you know it when you see it" things. Common sense, holistic evaluation, and user testing should predominantly guide the evaluation of the cognitive accessibility of the web. Cognitive accessibility can be defined by the following principles: Simple Consistent Clear Multimodal Error Tolerant Focused on Attention Improving web accessibility for.