Website Accessibility
Is your website ADA Compliant?
Get on the right path to Accessibility
Businesses today should be aware of the legal requirement to make accommodations for people with disabilities. The Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, are the set of laws that require businesses to provide accommodations such as, wheelchair accessibility, access to service animals, as well as requiring Braille for the visually impaired. This set of laws also extends into the digital realm and is referred to generally as Website Accessibility.
Who needs to comply with ADA?
Business requirements for compliance
To understand the evolving rules around ADA a good place to start is to find which businesses are required to comply. Generally, any business with at least 15 full-time employees that operates for 20 or more weeks every year is subject to this law. And, more specifically, businesses that fall into the category of “public accommodation,” such as hotels, banks and public transportation, are also required to comply regardless of size.
What is needed to get compliant?
How to improve your site for all users
ADA is basically an optimization of your site’s content to fix website accessibility errors associated with the content structure and descriptive details to enable it to read properly in screen reading software. Depending on the level of WCAG (Web Consortium Accessibility Guidelines) that you want to accommodate. This is a brief list of the type of updates that are needed to start:
- Alt tags are required for every image on your site. The alt text helps with SEO, but it also allows the blind to hear descriptions of the image that they are unable to view.
- Include transcripts for video and audio content. Again, this can be a benefit for optimizing your page and your video for placement on YouTube or other platforms.
- Establish the Language of the page. Making it clear what language the site should be read in helps users who utilize text readers. Text readers can identify those codes and function accordingly.
- Allow your sites navigation to be "tab-browseable" or by using the arrow keys: This is critical because the visually impaired rely on their keyboard to navigate your website.
- Allow the user to change text size and contrast levels of your content: Inline changes to the fonts display and dynamic changes to the text/background coloring of the pages.
ADA the right way
Our own website has a great example of many of these best practices. Click the accessibility icon in the bottom left corner of your screen to see real examples of these changes. Try turning on the screen reader, change the font sizes, improve the contrast of the page, etc.
It may seem like just another set of rules to pile on your business, but there are many customers who cannot interact with your website as it is currently constructed. Website accessibility helps make sure you can reach ALL of your prospective clients.
To find out more about ADA website compliance and how you can protect your business, call for a FREE ADA Website Audit and consultation with your team at VisionFriendly.com
630.553.0000.
