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Why Usability?

Compliance with the W3C (EU) or Section 508 (US) guidelines is certainly a necessary first step in making your web presence accessible. However accessibility as measured by those guidelines is very often not enough to make your website actually usable. It is quite possible for a site to pass all automated testing protocols and still leave a user so frustrated or confused that they cannot continue. Most web users will decide within the first five seconds if they will remain to make a purchase or look for information on a site. Quality design will help all your potential customers and users become actual ones.

At Page Accessibility Labs (PAL) our core testers are all people who have experience in web design, website accessibility practices and/or assistive technology development and they are all reliant on assistive technologies such as screen readers for their daily web usage. They are partially sighted or completely blind. We also retain testers with hearing or cognitive disorders when appropriate. In short, we relay on your target audience to test and report on your website's accessibility and usability. This sets PAL apart from most of our competition.


However, the results of our usability testing can help you improve your website for all users, especially those new to the web, seniors, and many other less 'web savvy' populations. Using a PAL Usability report to improve you current site or as a consideration for your next one will give your web presence a competitive edge in those valuable first seconds when a user decides to stay or go back to a search engine and look up your competition.


Simple compliance with W3C or 508 checkpoints may shield your company or organization from lawsuit for now but a commitment to usability for all your present and potential customers, clients, and users will help you grow a more loyal customer base.

Learn About Accessibility Testing

Some concrete examples

  • Using CSS to place links to such things as Main Content, Global and Page Specific Navigation, and Lists of Required and Optional Form Fields at the top of the page which are invisible to the sighted web surfer but are read aloud by the screen reader. 
  • Offering multiple Style Sheets so those who wish to see the page in high contrast or with large fonts can easily do so and the designer continues to control the look of the page. 
  • And most important - relying on those for whom these considerations are made, disabled web users reliant on assistive technologies, to test and report on the usability of your web presence.