Practitioners teaching new Internet users often report that adult learners are disappointed by their first experiences of the World Wide Web. This article focuses on problematic experiences of developing new web-based literacy practices, particularly for adult learners, and how they can be addressed without attributing difficulties to learners' own deficiencies or attitudes. The perspectives of inexperienced learners in a variety of settings are discussed in relation to the constructs of usability and affordance. Concepts of multimodal affordances and hypermodality, developed within textual studies, foreground potential readings while usability studies foreground technological design. Within literacy studies meanwhile there has been a strong turn towards social context. This paper aims to connect these models of reading, rooted variously in studies of human-computer interaction, theoretical approaches to multimodal texts, and socially situated literacy practices. It concludes that for practitioners, an interdisciplinary approach can be most effective.