Usability & Accessibility

A usable and accessible website has many important benefits: better user experience, increased sales and higher search engine positions. In some cases you are required by law to ensure that your website is accessible to all.

So, what makes a website inaccessible? Rich media like Flash, video, audio and even images are barriers to people with vision and hearing impairments. Therefore, it is important to provide text-based alternatives to these elements. If you opt to develop your entire site in Flash then a plain HTML version should also be developed.

As well as accessibility it is important to consider your site's usability. Can your users complete the key tasks on your site? (e.g. submit a contact message, buy a product, register for your newsletter etc). Storm can provide usability testing of new and existing websites to identify areas where visitors are struggling to use your site.

Some organizations have a legal obligation to provide accessible websites under the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act). You may be required by law to provide audio-text alternatives or screen reader friendly website content.

Besides your legal obligations you should consider that an inaccessible website is ignoring a large potential client base. By not catering for disabled Internet users you are turning business away.

Storm aim to build websites to meet a baseline level of accessibility and are more than happy to go further at your request. We also perform cross-browser and cross-platform tests on your website to ensure that all of its content is available to users on any computer.

Usability testing is the process of sitting down with real visitors to your site and observing them completing the key tasks you expect. Only through this hands-on, one-to-one interaction can you identify problems with your site which are preventing users from achieving their goal.

During a test we walk representative users through the site's key features, observing their behaviour and noting anomalies and failures. The results of this process can be fed back into the design process to make a smoother and more usable site.

Typical errors that are uncovered include: