Digital accessibility means “developers creating and providing interfaces with consistent control regardless of the user’s disability status, and users utilizing them.”1

WCAG organizes this into four principles called POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.2

Various Sub-characteristics of User Experience

Among various definitions of User Experience, the following quote from the book Software Built by Humble Developers, Yet Arrogant in Design (Korean), which deals with digital accessibility and references additional UX specialist books, remains most memorable to me.

User Experience = Usefulness x Usability x Availability x Aesthetics x Offline Issues

  • Usefulness: Users perceive the service as valuable
  • Usability: Users easily learn how to operate, easily input, and easily interpret results
  • Availability: Using the service when you want to use it. Knowing when it will be available when you cannot use it

Aesthetics and Offline Issues are omitted as they fall outside the topic of discussion.
— Mobile User Experience Design (『모바일 사용자 경험 디자인』), 2007, Hanbit Media3

Connecting Characteristics with WCAG

Looking for connections between each characteristic of user experience and WCAG, Usability corresponds to Perceivable and Understandable, while Availability corresponds to Operable.

Following this induction, I came to think that web accessibility is a subset of user experience.

  1. Original text: “Designing and building your digital offerings so that, regardless of a person’s mental or physical ability, they can still interact with your website, app, or other digital product in a meaningful and equal way.” — Accessibility principles - How is digital accessibility measured? | web.dev ↩︎

  2. Written with reference to materials from Accessibility principles - How is digital accessibility measured? | web.dev and How to Meet WCAG (Quick Reference) | W3C. ↩︎

  3. Mobile User Experience Design (『모바일 사용자 경험 디자인』), 2007, Hanbit Media - Publisher detail page (Korean) ↩︎