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Re: Usability vs. Accessibility

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From: _mallory
Date: Mar 22, 2016 11:52AM

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 03:49:06PM -0400, Chagnon | PubCom.com wrote:
> Personally, I think it's impossible to separate accessibility from usability. One without the other is complete failure to communicate.

Personally I agree. I find this related to the two definitions I find
of "accessibility" for digital-- there's the one that focuses solely
on physical disabilities, and the Tim Berners-Lee hippy-view of
"works on as many devices in as many places for as many people as
reasonably possible." Some people call this last one a sort of
#allLivesMatter so I tend to add to it "But with particular emphasis
and thought on those with physical disabilities since the usability
and (device/network/etc) access problems hit these folks
disproporionally harder."

It's for this reason that I'll personally, mentally put Progressive
Enhancement in as an accessibility-related topic, while understanding
that most other people in this space will say things like "Javascript
running has nothing to do with disabilities." I find this is a bit of
an attitude from developers that honestly has the very same roots as
the attitude other developers have about disabled users. Building for
as many users as possible means just that and it is an excellent start
for building "accessibly for those with physical disabilites." Building
for more devices instead of only iPhones and latest-and-greatest
browsers doesn't just assist the poor or people with less access to
newer devices-- it also automatically works better or those held
to particular, maybe less-standard devices due to disability or AT
software demands as well. One feeds and influences the other.

I'm particularly thinking of this a lot when I need to build any
scripted aria-ised widgets. I really cannot allow something to
come through to a user with roles set on it in the HTML if something
stopped, blocked, or mangled the Javascript necessary to make those
roles have any useful meaning. So I prefer to let JS set the roles
and states, and let CSS style based on the presence of the roles,
so if somehing didn't come through, users aren't left in some
half-state of nothing-works.

If I can't use it, it's not accessible to me. If I can use it, it
is accessible, but perhaps difficult and frustrating. If I can
use it, use it easily and without too much thought, it's both
accessible and usable.

So some people take accessibility to be the binary (it can be
accessed or not) and usability to describe *how* well it can
be used. ...Usability as an extension of describing the accessibility
of the site/app/whatever.

Sorry for the ramble.
_mallory