Are you excluding audience from accessing the digital material you created?

Let’s say you dedicated your blood, sweat and even some tears… or at the very least, some frustrating nights to finding reliable sources, joined an online community interested in the same topic and you finally have a website you are ready to share with the world. How frustrating would it be to find out that someone is keeping people from accessing, contributing to or even benefiting from your material? What if that someone was you? How can that be possible you ask? We’ll take a look here.

Accessibility, usability, and inclusion are closely related aspects in creating a web that works for everyone(Shawn Lawton Henry). If authors of online content do not make an effort to ensure the user can actually reach the website and even further, that the user is given the opportunity to digest the material, they may be inadvertently losing intended audience or, if selling a product, losing customers.

Accessibility tools such as closed captions, large buttons and text to speech are features often associated with physical disabilities. The author may not only miss out on the participation of those with physical disabilities, but also, people without any disability. I often have closed captioning turned on when videos have a very low volume, the speakers might have a heavy accent or maybe I am just not familiar with the subject and don’t recognize words. Text to speech was very helpful when I had hand surgery and was able to participate in work conversations by the website doing the typing as I spoke. Finally, it is very frustrating being on an unstable platform, such as a moving car, and constantly navigating to an unintended page because the navigation buttons or links are too small.

Usability refers to products being effective, efficient, and satisfying (Shawn Lawton Henry). Again, I will associate this to product sales. I found a clothing site many years ago https://rogueamerican.com/, the website was amazing, clothing designs was rugged, and prices were competitive, I was wearing their items about 7 days later. However, I stopped going to the site because the site would fault out during the check-out process. It may be different now, but I never went back after being frustrated a few times. Lack of attention during design to place buttons, menus or for the website to behave as people have come to expect will detract from web traffic.

Another way to reduce the audience is… to not include the audience. This lack of inclusion may include using technical language only professionals would understand, cultural barriers or the one I will focus on here, not including those users with low bandwidth. The Navy designed a website with all sorts of good information, training modules and data processing with the idea of providing all Sailors with flexible resources… they made one mistake; like some rural areas, ships have limited bandwidth and the intended users often avoid the site because of the excessive time delays. Including a “low bandwidth” option on the website increases the audience for that site.

Do you think these same features may be used purposefully with the ill intent of keeping some people away from information or opportunities?

 

References

RogueAmerican.com. (2023).   Retrieved from https://rogueamerican.com/

Shawn Lawton Henry, S. A.-Z., and Kevin White. (6 May 2016).   Retrieved from https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility-usability-inclusion/