I’ve been pondering a post on this subject for a while, and after a trip to info360 conference – I’m ready to pounce!
What is the word “accessible”? I hear so many people use the word in a variety of contexts, especially in the wonderful land of software.
Accessible is “the quality of being at hand when needed.” It shares a number of adjectives such as: capable of being reached, of being read with comprehension and easy to reach.
I recently found www.visualthesaurus.com and have been playing with it ever since. Although I suspect the interface is very inaccessible, it’s been an interesting way to bring up words and visually navigate the thesaurus. Below please find two screenshots from it, one on “accessible” and the other on “accessibility”.
You should find that not only do both words relate, but that they are almost exclusive to each other and are joined by one common phrase: availability (inaccessible is there too but, lets leave it out for now!). We could argue nouns, verbs and adjectives till we are blue in the face but, according to the visual maps (thanks @ VisualThesaurus), only “availability” is present in both.
Everyone uses accessible everywhere. Software vendors claim their products are accessible, meaning you can get to it. SaaS and cloud providers pretty much guarantee you that you will have an accessible service or experience. There are a host of companies that all focus on making their product or service accessible, or in this case, available. At the conference, I lost count how many times I heard the A word used in one form or another. At first it bothered me but, I’ve now made the distinction in speaking with folks at the show, and at the bar.
Accessible is what it is, accessibility is really the word we should be focusing our efforts on. It is the easiest way to tie user experience with assistive technologies for those who are impaired in some way.
What do you think?
On a related note, you will likely find their website (VisualThesaurus) is pretty darn inaccessible. Compared to ours on the ATRC webchecker, they have 4x as many potential problems and almost 20x as many known issues.
