July 24, 2007
Mel Pedley of Accessites.org has posted an excellent article on the difference between web accessibility and web usability.
Whilst there is no doubt that the two topics do overlap to a significant degree, it is important to differentiate between them. Unlike web accessibility which impacts directly upon disabled users, web usability affects all users, and can be defined as a measure of how easy it is for a generic site visitor to carry out a task such as finding a given piece of information or buying a certain product.
Web Usability goes on to explore key components which make a site usable.