Simple Steps to Help More People Enjoy Your Software

When you’ve developed a software, it’s definitely rewarding to know that many people are finding it useful and benefiting from it. And you certainly have made your own way to ensure that your software would be enjoyed by as many persons as possible.

You can nonetheless reach an even larger set of users by ensuring that your software has these basic yet very helpful features.

Keyboard Accessibility

Keyboard accessibility refers to the quality of an application that lets users access it entirely through the keyboard. When you’re creating your software, make sure that buttons, text boxes, and other controls can be accessed using the keyboard.

Here’s how to test the keyboard accessibility of your software. Load your software and set your mouse aside. Then try to access every feature and control in your software using only your keyboard. In this process, the most useful keys are the tab key and the arrow keys. If you can access and activate everything via your keyboard, your software has good keyboard accessibility. If there are features and controls that you can’t access using this method, you should focus on making them accessible via the keyboard.

Keyboard accessibility benefits people who can’t use the mouse. This huge group of Internet users consists of people with motor disabilities and people with vision impairments.

Easy to Understand Messages

One of the last things you want your users to do is to go “Huh?” or “What?” when they read a dialog box or an error message in your software. This can prevent them from using your software again.

To avoid this, try to make your text as easy to understand as possible. Do this in all components of your software, especially the help section. Use plain English, or if your software is in another language, avoid using complex terms. When making error messages, try to include solutions or suggestions in the messages. Also, the software should always inform the user of what is currently happening (e.g. processing of information, modifying the settings).

You can ask a friend to help you in this step. You may want to choose someone who has never seen your software before. While your friend is using the software, ask him or her if the software’s texts and messages can be understood in one reading. Change any message or text that are quite difficult to understand or can be easily misinterpreted.

Screen and Sound Alerts

Alerts are useful especially in telling the user of an urgent or necessary event. There are a number of ways to provide these alerts. However, we should be aware that certain users may not be able to notice a particular alert.

If you use screen alerts such as a momentary change in the screen’s color, blind users would not be able to see this information. On the other hand, if you use sound alerts, persons who have hearing impairments may not be able to hear them.

The best way to solve this issue is to provide alerts in more than one format. Try to include both visual and audio notifications in your software. This helps your users quickly understand notifications, regardless of whether they have disabilities or not. Additionally, you may want to provide an option for certain users to turn off these notifications if they choose not to have them.

Conclusion

These are only examples of steps to make your software more usable to a wider set of users. But if you apply these steps, you would have a good chance of increasing your clientele. More importantly, users would appreciate your effort and would greatly benefit from your programming work.