Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
This law requires federal agencies to make their electronic and information tech-
nology accessible to people with disabilities, including their websites. The law
applies to all federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use elec-
tronic and information technology. Section 508 specifies 16 standards that web-
sites must meet. The Section 508 requirements are essentially a subset of the full
WCAG 2.0 guidelines. We believe the most useful metric for illustrating Section
508 compliance is a page-level metric, indicating whether the page passes all
16 standards or not. You can then chart the percentage of pages that pass versus
those that fail.
UPDATE TO SECTION 508
At the time of the writing of this second edition, an update of Section 508 is expected
shortly. A 2011 draft has been released, commented on, and public hearings have been
held. The new version is much more complete and closely reflects WCAG 2.0. The latest
information can be found at
http://www.access-board.gov/508.htm
.
9.4 RETURN-ON-INVESTMENT DATA
A topic about usability metrics wouldn't be complete without at least some dis-
cussion of return on investment, as the usability metrics discussed in this topic
often play a key role in calculating ROI. But because entire topics have been
written on this topic (Bias & Mayhew, 2005; Mayhew & Bias, 1994), our purpose
is to just introduce some of the concepts.
The basic idea behind usability ROI, of course, is to calculate the financial
benefit attributable to usability enhancements for a product, system, or website.
These financial benefits are usually derived from such measures as increased
sales, increased productivity, or decreased support costs that can be attributed to
the usability improvements. The key is to identify the cost associated with the
usability improvements and then compare those to the financial benefits.
As Bias and Mayhew (2005) summarize, there are two major categories of
ROI, with different types of returns for each:
•
InternalROI:
o
Increased user productivity
o
Decreased user errors
o
Decreased training costs
o
Savings gained from making changes earlier in the design
life cycle
o
Decreased user support
•
ExternalROI:
o
Increased sales
o
Decreased customer support costs
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