5 Tips To Make Your Website Accessible and ADA-Compliant

If you are someone who runs a business and has a website, it’s only natural for you to want more traffic on your site. To have more people interact with your content, it must be easily accessible and as inclusive as possible.

But how do you make sure that your website is ADA compliant? Read through the entire article to find out.

5 Tips For An ADA Compliant Website

To pass the accessibility test, your website must have ADA compliance, making the website accessible to everyone in a proactive way. Here are 5 tips to make your website accessible and ADA-compliant.

Audit Site Codes

Run auditing on your websites to ensure they meet all standards for ADA compliance. The audit will work as a maintenance and check for gaps that do not meet the standards set by the ADA compliance website checklist. Auditing codes will also ensure the compatibility of your website with technological activities, assistive gestures, and screen readers.

Fonts That Are Easy to Read

It is best to use fonts on your website that are easy to read and not too stylish. There aren’t any set fonts to use by ADA compliance companies; however, your fonts should not be hard for the naked eye to make out. Your fonts should also be the colors that are readable by the audience. The color of your font should contrast with the background of the interface.

Create Closed Captions and Transcripts
While posting content on your website, make use of what you offer to users who suffer from various disabilities to access information. All your transcripts must have audio so people who need visual aids can hear what’s written.
Similarly, you should also provide audio descriptions and closed captions for videos, allowing users with hearing disabilities to engage with the content on your website.

Include Alternate texting

Every image uploaded on your website should have an alternative text provided with it. This is for users to understand the images clearly and the message you are trying to deliver. If your images contain text, then that too should be included in the alternate text. This is very important for websites that use informative images.
This will help readers seeking information better understand your content, and your image searches will appear in search results when similar images are searched for.

Include Voice Recognition

When designing websites, you should always keep audiences with cognitive and neurological concerns. Your website should have the accessibility of voice recognition. There should also be options of text-to-speech functionality on your website.

Users often search up content using Google Assistance. You would wish to make information on your site reach them easily on search up.

How To Design An Accessible Website?

To design a website that is more accessible to the general public, your website needs to have a user-friendly interface. It must offer ease of accessibility to people from all parts of the world. Here are a few of the suggestions you should consider when designing a website to have user accessibility.

● Offer Different language

Give options for your audience to choose when it comes to language. You may attract audiences from different parts of the world who would find it easy to read and gather information in their native language. This will help your site be more accessible all over the world.

● Offer Different Region

Users from all over the world should be able to interact with services that are compatible with their timezone. This way, your audience will not have to sit and figure out time differences between where they are and where your business is set up, making it easy for them to access data.

Making your site ADA accessible globally will help you reach out to a wider audience, resulting in more traffic to your website.

● Offer Suggestions

If your audience has a disability and is encountering input errors, your website should offer alternatives and suggestions to aid them while they are on your site looking for information and be automatically redirected to the content they are trying to navigate.

● Accessibility Using Keyboard Shortcuts

A wide audience trying to access data from your website may have mobility disabilities. They might be unable to use a trackpad or a mouse when browsing through the website. You should design a website that ensures that users with disabilities can access all information with a keyboard in a logical way.

They may scroll up and down using the directional keys on their keyboard and select items using enter. Navigation on your website should be easily accessible for all, even via a keyboard.

Conclusion

Your website should be easily accessible for people who are not only looking for information on your site but also have visual or hearing disabilities. With ADA compliance you will reach a wider set of audiences, improving your search engine results. etc.

Working on a website can be difficult. Adding new media and updating pages is chore, even though you know your company website needs to evolve and become more accessible to the many users you are trying to reach. Maybe when you first built it, accessibility wasn’t even really discussed. But now you’ve taken a step back, looked at your customer base with a desire to include everyone and you’ve realized just how important it is to make your site accessible. However, the thought of building a robust site that can do all the things you want it to do is overwhelming.

What is Web Accessibility

A practice of designing and coding the website in order to provide complete compatibility in accessing it by people with disabilities. In addition, it is a way to improve search engine optimization only an ADA Compliant Web Designer will help you to make your website Compliant. Is your website compatible? By going through the checklist below, you can get the answer.

Assessing Current Web Pages and Content

The website must include a feature like a navigation link at the top of the page. These links have a bypass mechanism such as a “skip navigation” link. This feature directs screen readers to bypass the row of navigation links and start at the web page content. It is beneficial for people who use screen readers to avoid to listen to all the links each time they jump to a new page.
All the links should be understandable when taken out of the context. For example, images without alternative text and links without worded as “click here”.
All the graphics, maps, images, and other non-text content must provide text alternatives through the alt attribute, a hidden/visible long description.
All the documents posted on the website should available in HTML or another accessible text-based format. It is also applicable to other formats like Portable Document Format (PDF).
The online forms on the website should be structured so assistive technology can identify, describe and operate the controls and inputs. By doing this, people with disabilities can review and submit the forms.
If the website has online forms, the drop-down list should describe the information instead of displaying a response option. For instance, “Your Age” instead of “18-25”.
If the website has data charts and tables, they should be structured so that all data cells are associated with column and row identifiers.
All the video files on the website must have audio descriptions (if necessary). This is for the convenience of blind people or for having a visual impairment disability.
All the video files on the website must have synchronized captions. People with hearing problems or deaf can access these files conveniently.
All the audio files on the website should have synchronized captions to provide access to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
All web pages should be designed so that they can be viewed using visitors’ web browser and operating system settings for color and font.

About Website Accessibility Policy and Procedures

One must have a written policy on website accessibility.
The website accessibility policy must be posted on the website at a location where it can be easily found.
The procedure should be developed to ensure that content is not added to the website until it has been made accessible.
It should be confirmed that the website manager has checked the code and structure of all new web pages before they are posted.
While adding the PDFs to the website, these should be accessible. Also, the text-based versions of the documents should be accessible at the same time as PDF versions.
Make sure that the in-house and contractor staff has received the information about the website accessibility policy and procedure to confirm the website accessibility.
It should be confirmed that in-house and contractor staff has received appropriate training on how to ensure the accessibility of the website.
The website should have a specific written plan if it contains inaccessible content. Also, it should include timeframes in place to make all of the existing web content accessible.
A complete plan to improve website accessibility should be posted along with invited suggestions for improvement.
The homepage should include easily locatable information that includes contact details like telephone number and email address. This is useful for reporting website accessibility problems and requesting accessibility services with information.
A website should have procedures in place to assure a quick response to the visitors with disabilities who have difficulty in accessing information or services available on the website.
Feedback from people who use a variety of assistive technologies is helpful in ensuring website accessibility. So make sure to ask disability groups representing people to provide feedback on the accessibility of your website.
Testing the website using a product available on the internet is helpful, These tools are of free cost and check the accessibility of a website. They may not identify all accessibility issues and flag issues that are not accessibility problems. However, these are, nonetheless, a helpful way to improve website accessibility.

Checklist of Action Items for Improving the Accessibility of a Website

In addition, while considering the above suggestions, the following checklist initially prepared by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for Federal Agencies provides further guidelines on ways to make websites more accessible for persons with disabilities.

This practical advice, as well as another checklist, are available at:

Satisfying all of these items does not necessarily mean that a website complies with ADA, but it will improve the website’s accessibility and decrease the risk of litigation. Again, an Expert or Web Accessibility Consulting & Services provider should be engaged to conduct a comprehensive review of your website.

Nothing brings you closer to reality than actually facing it. This is the premise of my latest attempt to spread awareness about Web Accessibility.

For better understand, here is a link in which a practical example is shown to make the websites’ user experience better by following the guidelines. Also, it tells the issues affecting various users on the internet with solutions.

You can make your website ADA compliant in an easy way by consulting the professionals, who can do this job effortlessly. Also, you can get a quick website audit from To Be ADA Compliant that offers complete web accessibility consulting & services in California, USA.

Resource: https://dev.to/chinchang/an-interactive-and-practical-introduction-to-web-accessibility-22o1