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Essay / Importance of accessibility and usability
This document explains the distinction and overlap between accessibility and usability and further strives to highlight the importance of maintaining 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 should not be banned”?Get the original essay Accessibility addresses discriminatory aspects related to equivalent user experience for people with disabilities, including people belonging to different age groups or with age-related impairments. For the web, accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with websites and tools and can contribute equally without barriers. Usability and user experience design is the process of designing products to be effective, efficient, and satisfying. More 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 Everyone falls under the general public framework. So what defines it is the general psyche of people. If we apply the principles of psychology to predict and explain how our customers think and act, we get good web design. Behavior is heavily influenced by unconscious thought, but it is often more predictable than one might think. Understanding the foundations of human cognition will help explain and anticipate user behavior. So, the help is to design a website suitable for everyone. Common important aspects (all age groups) that should always be kept in mind, both in terms of usability and accessibility when designing sites, are: Attention Visual perception Memory and knowledge Information seeking strategies Mental models to predict interactions and outcomes Language Problem solving and decision making Emotion-driven behavior B. Children and adolescents Identify the applicable funding agency here. If there is none, delete this text box. Website design for children is usually based solely on folklore about how children are supposed to behave. The best indicator of how children use websites is their level of online practice. Although many usage guidelines are the same as 9 years ago, we have seen a major change since the first study: today's children are much more experienced in using computers and Internet. As a result, they're not as prone to the common problems encountered by first-time users that we found in our first study. Kids these days are using computers almost as soon as they can sit down and move a mouse or tap on a screen. It is now common for a 7 year old to be a seasoned internet user with several years of experience. Most of the basic rules for usable web design are the same for children and adults, although often with differences in degree. The biggest finding from both new and old research is the need to target very narrow age groups when designing for children. Indeed, “design for children,” defined as anyone aged 3 to 12, does not exist. At a minimum, you should distinguish betweenyoung children (3 to 5 years old), mid-range children (6 to 8 years old) and older children (9 to 12 years old). Each group has different behaviors, and users become more familiar with the Web as they age. And these different needs go well beyond the obvious imperative to design differently for pre-readers, beginning readers, and moderately skilled readers. To understand the expectations of a generation that grew up with technology and the Internet, we conducted empirical usability studies with real adolescents to identify specific guidelines for how websites can be improved to match abilities and the preferences of adolescents. Our research disproves many stereotypes, including that teenagers: simply want to be entertained online with graphics and multimedia; are extremely technologically savvy; using smartphones for everything and wanting everything to be social. Although their specific tasks may differ from those of adults, adolescents are similar to adults in many ways: both groups expect websites to be easy to use and allow them to accomplish their tasks. Like adults, teens are goal-oriented and don't surf the web aimlessly; therefore, the usability of the website is as important to them as to any other user group. Teenagers use the Internet on many devices and in varied environments. For our research, we focused on web usability, primarily from desktop and laptop computers. We also looked at the usability of mobile websites and how teens use mobile devices. Although teenagers spend endless amounts of time texting, checking Facebook, etc., we didn't focus on that because our goal was to develop design guidelines for consumer websites, not to help create the next Facebook.C. Elderly The human aging process begins when you turn 20; people in their 40s already have enough impaired vision to need slightly larger fonts than eagle-eyed designers in their 20s. Seniors have become more proficient in using the Web. Although we don't see much progress over time in the web skills of the general public, the situation for seniors is different. Unlike seniors a decade ago, today's seniors are more likely to have learned to use a computer while they were still working. Seniors who learn through company and peer training are more likely to create strong mental models than seniors who acquired their computer skills after retirement. It is obviously important to recognize that even young people have physical and cognitive limitations. But, as the table makes clear, these problems are much more serious for older users. The biggest finding from both new and old research is the need to target very narrow age groups when designing for children. Indeed, “design for children,” defined as anyone aged 3 to 12, does not exist. At a minimum, you should distinguish between young children (3-5 years old), mid-range children (6-8 years old), and older children (9-12 years old). Each group has different behaviors, and users become more familiar with the Web as they age. And these different needs go well beyond..