Increased Usability through Accessibility
Written on September 30, 2011
This blog post is part of a series of posts discussing the Business Case for Accessibility. In order to get a full view of the Business Case for Accessibility, I encourage you to read all posts in this series, links to which can be found at the bottom of this post.
Somewhat along the lines of the SEO argument are claims that accessibility will increase usability. The benefits to usability are claimed to come from things like clear organization of content, content chunking, effective navigation, and clear language.
- Does it increase income? Maybe. To be frank, people tend to overstate the business value of usability in general. By proxy I’d say that claims concerning the business value of better-usability-via-accessibility are even more overstated.
- Does save money? Probably not. Usability has been argued to save money in terms of support savings, etc. which is probably a legitimate claim. I don’t see anything specifically related to such arguments the WCAG 2.0 Success Criterion that have been tied to better usability.
- Does it mitigate risk? Probably not
- How strong is the evidence? Weak. I’ve seen no data to support these claims. Like the SEO arguments, only a very small portion of [...]