Readability vs. accessibility

Readability and accessibility play significantly different but equally essential roles in the success of a webpage, and attaining that measure of success so as to be influential means to strike the proverbially fine balance between the two.

Readability

• Minimum on-site clutter


• Focused content


• Audience retention


• Sensible pagination that makes content easy to find

Accessibility

• Keeping categories and tags visible


• Keeping content quickly recognizable


• Ensuring search engines point to site


• Audience creation


• Sensible pagination that segregates content

Striking the balance

You and your audience

• Who you’re writing for, why you’re writing it, when you’ll be posting, what you’re writing – know the answers


• The easier you make it for people to give you feedback, the more feedback you’ll get


• Use a fog index calculator and keep the readability of the text to a maximum of 14


• Increase representation to increase participation; increase participation to increase obligation

Shaping your webpage

• What do you want your audience to focus on


• Draw up a process control chart, make sure each page is at most 2 clicks away from any other page


• Reduce on-site clutter by placing excerpts on the front-page and the whole body on an inner, separate page – the more clutter there is, the less inclined anyone will be to read


• How you paginate reflects your intentions with the site
  
  [caption id="attachment_7882" align="aligncenter" width="432" caption="Coolvibe is all about digital art and, accordingly, paginates according to genre and not the "how" of their creation."][/caption]
  
  [caption id="attachment_7881" align="aligncenter" width="432" caption="Cricinfo paginates according to the teams, ongoing tours and other sport-oriented essentials."][/caption]
  
  [caption id="attachment_7883" align="aligncenter" width="432" caption="YCombinator News places headlines on its front page and links to other sites through them - which means no pages are necessary for individual users as such."][/caption]
  
  Pagination also reflects how the webpage wants the audience to interact with it.

Finally: use the site once yourself, discover needs.