Accessibility vs Usability: What Australian Businesses Need to Know
Do you know the difference between accessibility VS usability when it comes to your website?
Your website may be easy to use for most people, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is accessible. Similarly, a website can meet important accessibility requirements but still be frustrating, confusing, or difficult to navigate.
This is where the difference between accessibility and usability becomes important.
For Australian businesses, understanding both is becoming increasingly important. Accessibility helps ensure people with disability can access and interact with your website, while usability focuses on whether your website is intuitive, efficient, and easy for everyone to use.
Getting both right can improve the customer experience, increase your potential audience, support better SEO, and help reduce barriers to doing business online.
So, what is the difference between accessibility and usability, what does Australian law require, and what should your business actually be doing to make sure you have the right balance of both?
What Is Website Accessibility?
Website accessibility is about making your website usable by people with a wide range of disabilities and access needs. This can include people who:
- Are blind or have low vision
- Are deaf or hard of hearing
- Have mobility or motor impairments
- Have cognitive or learning disabilities
- Use assistive technologies such as screen readers
- Navigate websites using a keyboard rather than a mouse
- Use voice control or other accessibility tools
An accessible website is designed so that people can perceive, navigate, understand, and interact with its content.
The internationally recognised standard for website accessibility is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The current version is WCAG 2.2, released in October 2023. The Australian Human Rights Commission recommends organisations aim for WCAG 2.2 Level AA as a minimum.
What Is Website Usability?
Usability is different. It is about how easy and intuitive your website is for people to use. A usable website makes it easy for visitors to:
- Find information
- Navigate between pages
- Complete forms
- Make purchases
- Contact your business
- Find answers to common questions
- Complete tasks easily
For example, imagine your website has a perfectly accessible contact form. However, the form contains 15 unnecessary fields, uses confusing terminology. and doesn’t clearly explain what information the customer needs to provide.
It may be accessible, but it isn’t particularly usable.
Accessibility asks: “Can all people access and use this?”
Usability asks: “How easy is it to use?”
The best websites consider both.
Why Australian Businesses Need to Take Accessibility Seriously
Accessibility isn’t simply a nice-to-have feature for businesses that want to demonstrate social responsibility. The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability, including in the provision of goods and services. The application of accessibility principles to websites has also been recognised in Australian legal decisions.
However, it’s important to understand that there isn’t one universal checklist that says every Australian business website must meet exactly the same technical requirements. Your obligations can depend on your business, industry, services, and circumstances.
For example, Australian Government digital services have specific accessibility requirements, with government standards requiring alignment with WCAG 2.2 Level AA.
For private businesses, WCAG 2.2 Level AA is a sensible benchmark and widely recognised best-practice target, but businesses should consider their specific legal obligations rather than assuming that achieving a particular WCAG level automatically guarantees legal compliance.
What Are the Minimum Website Accessibility Requirements?
For most businesses looking for a practical starting point, WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the benchmark to work towards. WCAG is based around four core principles. Your website should be:
Perceivable
– Information needs to be presented in ways people can perceive. Examples include:
- Providing meaningful alternative text for images
- Captions for relevant video content
- Sufficient colour contrast
- Content that can be resized without becoming unusable
- Avoiding information that relies solely on colour
Operable
– People need to be able to navigate and interact with your website, this includes:
- Keyboard navigation
- Clearly visible focus indicators
- Accessible menus
- Logical navigation
- Avoiding inaccessible interactive elements
- Giving users enough time to complete tasks where relevant
Understandable
– Your website should be clear and predictable, this means:
- Using straightforward language
- Providing descriptive headings
- Making forms understandable
- Giving clear instructions
- Providing useful error messages
- Keeping navigation consistent
Robust
– Your website needs to work with different browsers, devices, and assistive technologies. This includes using appropriate HTML and web standards and testing whether interactive elements work with technologies such as screen readers, keyboards, and voice controls.
The Australian Government’s accessibility guidance specifically recommends considering assistive technologies, including screen readers, keyboard input, and voice commands, and combining automated accessibility testing with testing involving real users.
Accessibility Is for Everyone
One of the biggest misconceptions about accessibility is that it only benefits people with disabilities, accessibility improvements can help almost everyone, consider:
Captions
– Useful for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, but also for someone watching a video without sound.
Clear headings
– Useful for screen-reader users, but also for anyone scanning a long article.
Keyboard navigation
– Essential for some users, but useful when someone’s mouse or trackpad isn’t working.
Good colour contrast
– Important for people with visual impairments, but also helpful when viewing a website on a bright or small screen.
Simple language
– Helpful for those with cognitive difficulties, but beneficial for almost every website visitor.
Accessibility often improves the experience for everyone.
How Accessibility and Usability Can Improve Your Website
Getting accessibility and usability right can have significant business benefits, which include:
Better customer experience
– Visitors can find information and complete tasks more easily.
Reach a larger audience
– An inaccessible website can exclude potential customers. Improving accessibility helps remove unnecessary barriers. The Australian Human Rights Commission notes that improving accessibility can increase market access and support greater economic participation.
Better mobile experiences
– Many accessibility and usability principles also encourage better responsive design, clearer interfaces, and easier interactions across devices.
Potential SEO benefits
– Accessibility itself isn’t simply an SEO ranking factor that guarantees higher rankings. However, many accessibility best practices overlap with good SEO and content practices.
Clear headings, descriptive links, meaningful content, useful image descriptions, and well-structured pages can make content easier for both people and search engines to understand.
Better conversion rates
– If customers can easily understand your offer, navigate your website, and complete forms or purchases, there are fewer barriers between them and conversion.
Accessibility Needs to Be Ongoing
– One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is treating accessibility as a one-off project.
Your website changes. New pages are added. Images are uploaded. Plugins are installed. Forms change. Videos are published. Website functionality is updated.
Every change can potentially introduce a new accessibility problem.
That’s why accessibility should be incorporated into your ongoing website maintenance and content processes. Automated tools can identify many common issues, but they cannot identify everything. Real-world testing and human feedback remain important. Australian Government guidance recommends using automated testing alongside testing with people.
How CircleBC Can Help
At CircleBC, we can help businesses make accessibility and usability part of their website strategy rather than an afterthought. We can review your website to identify potential accessibility and usability issues across areas such as:
- Navigation and page structure
- Headings, images, and alt text
- Colour contrast, links, buttons, and forms
- Mobile responsiveness
- Content structure
- Website functionality
- Plugins and integrations
From there, we can help prioritise improvements based on your website, users and business objectives. That might involve improving existing pages, fixing accessibility issues, updating website components, redesigning problematic sections, or undertaking a broader website redevelopment.
The goal isn’t simply to tick boxes. It’s to create a website that is accessible, intuitive, useful and effective.
Accessibility + Usability = A Better Website
Accessibility and usability aren’t competing priorities. They work together.
Accessibility helps ensure people aren’t excluded from using your website. Usability makes the experience easier and more intuitive once they arrive. For Australian businesses, the best approach is to consider accessibility from the beginning of a website project and continue testing it as the website evolves.
If your website hasn’t been reviewed for accessibility or usability recently, now is a good time to take a closer look.
Your website shouldn’t just work. It should work for as many people as possible, if you would like assistance on your accessibility or usability, get in touch, call us on 1300 978 073 or click here to book an obligation free chat.
FAQs - Accessibility vs Usability
What is the difference between accessibility and usability?
Accessibility is primarily about ensuring people, including people with disability, can access and interact with a website. Usability is about how easy, intuitive and efficient the website is to use. A good website needs both.
What accessibility standard should Australian websites follow?
WCAG 2.2 Level AA is a widely recognised benchmark, and the Australian Human Rights Commission recommends organisations conform to WCAG 2.2 at a minimum Level AA. Specific legal and regulatory obligations can vary depending on the organisation and circumstances.
Is website accessibility legally required in Australia?
Australian businesses can have obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, including in relation to access to goods and services. The precise requirements depend on the circumstances, industry, and type of business you run. Businesses should not assume that accessibility is optional simply because they are a private organisation.
What are the four principles of WCAG?
WCAG is built around four principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust, often abbreviated as POUR. These principles provide the foundation for creating accessible digital content.
Does website accessibility help SEO?
Accessibility and SEO have some important areas of overlap. Clear headings, descriptive links, meaningful content, structured information and useful alternative text can improve how both users and search engines understand your website. Accessibility should not, however, be treated simply as an SEO technique.
Can an accessibility plugin make my WordPress website accessible?
Accessibility plugins can help identify or address some issues, but they cannot guarantee that a website is fully accessible. Accessibility involves content, design, code, navigation, forms, functionality and compatibility with assistive technologies. Manual and real-world testing are still important.
How often should a website be checked for accessibility?
Accessibility should be considered whenever your website changes, rather than only during a redesign. Regular reviews are particularly important when adding new content, plugins, forms, videos or functionality.
Can CircleBC make my WordPress website more accessible?
Yes. CircleBC can review your WordPress website for potential accessibility and usability issues and help implement improvements across design, content, functionality, forms, navigation and technical development. The aim is to create a website that is easier for more people to access and use.