Top Reasons For Your Website To Be ADA Compliant

There are many design fashions to be aware of when building your brand’s website. A common question asked by most people is about its appearance that how it looks, or how could it convert visitors into customers. But no one asks, is your website ADA compliant? If not, what are the reason to have it?

First thing first, ADA is the Americans with Disability Act which was developed in 1990 to ensure that all people must be given equal opportunities including the disabled ones. The disabilities may be visual impairment, hearing disorder, or any physical capacities.

The rules are basically made for all the businesses that serve the public including building and website both. Thus, commercial buildings have almost all the facilities for handicapped people, what about your brand website? Is it ADA compliant? For this, the Official Standards of Website Accessibility may help you in checking your website accessibilities. In addition, here are a few benefits for having an ADA compliant website:

Expanding Your Target Audience

The figure says, there are 50 million people with disabilities in the U.S that implies there are 19% of this country has a disability. Thus, if your website is not ADA compliant then you are somewhere losing some potential users. The consequences are clear, they will opt for your competitor’s website for easy navigation because your website is not designed for them to deliver your services.

Improve Your SEO Efforts

The key element of Web content Accessibility Guidelines is the accessibility to screen readers, and these readers crawl your website that meets the WCAG, it will likely appeal to users, search engines, and screen readers. That eventually improves your SEO results. For better results, meta-tagging, alternative image text, video transcripts work best.

Hike Your Reputation

Being ADA compliant, your website is targeting more customers by which you are not only gaining more traffic on your website, side by side, you are gaining their trust as well as they also know how valuable they are to your business. This is one of a way to increase visitors as a way of recommendation. After visiting a couple of websites, a happy user surely will share their experience with their connections.

Overall Better Website Usability

A website with better navigation, good operable, designed by following the WCAG will offer easy to comprehend that will allow everyone to find what they are looking for. Thus, it is good for the disabled and non-disabled ones.

Win Over Penalties

Having an ADA compliant website, save you from penalties that several businesses like Foot Locker, Brooks Brothers, Kylie Jenner that have been sued for the lack of ADA compliant websites.

For better understanding, below are the points given for a more inclusive site and adopting the WCAG:

Analyze Your Current Site

ADA compliant website must meet the standards within these four categories:

Perceivable
Operable
Understandable
Robust

Make sure your website meets all the above requirements. Use the ADA guidelines as a starting point to create a blueprint for your own site.

Choose the Right Graphics

Carefully selection of graphics is an important part of accessible websites. The graphics must not be flashy more than three times per second. Besides, graphics should also have a description or caption with a read-aloud feature for a better understanding of visually impaired.

Alt-Text And Readable Font

Ensure to provide alt text and readable fonts to all the images in your code. Alt-text allows site readers to describe your image audibly.

Logical Website Features

Making everything easy to access is the key to a website. For example, the color combination and the color of the text must be easy to read. Also, putting a sign of “X” clearly on the upper corner of the pop-up to show how to close the window. A website must deliver clear information about what the user wants to gain.

Include Standard HTML Tags

The basic requirement is the code should be readable by an assistive reader. Also, the code must use standard HTML tags. The complex image documents can’t be understood by software that reads text aloud for visually impaired website users.

Friendly Keyboard And Pause

Not all users are able to interact with a touchscreen or a grip mouse. For instance, the reader must be able to pause content or slow down automatic scrolling/slideshow movements. Plus, eliminating videos that autoplay and have a time limit add more accessibility ease. Also, make sure that all video interactions and pausing should be completed using keyboard functions.

Remain Up to Date With Compliant Changes

Updating knowledge being in business is good for both point of views – business and consumers. Don’t forget ADA needs are ongoing. So, gain knowledge as much you can and give equal importance to every customer.

Overall, we have seen there are a lot of benefits of having an ADA compliant website that is good for the sake of easy accessibility as well as better business. In addition, having an ADA compliant website gives you more than what you think, a better accessible website with better results in point of SEO as well as building customer’s trust over you and your business.

For assistance, To Be ADA Compliant is one place that provides the best website audit for the website and design according to the guidelines to save your business hit by penalties. Make your business ADA compliant now and increase the sales along with a hike in visitors on the website with To Be ADA Compliant assistance.

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