A study of usability and accessibility in website design, for a small photography business

Abstract

Usability and accessibility plays a vital role in every online website and should not be thought of lightly. Many websites online today still make websites which are either difficult to navigate, visually unappealing or provide little information. The main focus of this study was to discover what is involved in order to make a website usable and accessible, and then put these elements into consideration when designing and producing a photography website for a small photography company. This dissertation examines a wide variety of literature from usability and accessibility gurus to photography website experts. The study also involves a number of practical research methods such as online questionnaires and observations of potential users testing the proposed website, all of which are analysed using graphs, tables and a number of statistics. The study provided a number of key results; being that many photography sites on the web today have little or no help to the user in the form of accessibility aids. Results also show that the most common disability within the 58 people questioned was dyslexia. Furthermore the most favoured accessibility aid was to have the ability to change the size of the font with 74% of users choosing this. The main conclusions derived from the study help display how the three clicks rule is a real conception, and that five users are enough to find all errors, but are not necessarily enough for a full scale test. The research argues that there is no major excuse to the lack of aids available on websites. It also suggests that doing a full scale investigation into the target audience will help benefit many sites and make them more accessible and user friendly.