ADA Website Compliance: An Introduction for Business & Law Firms

In this era of technology, website accessibility is crucial for attracting new consumers, ensuring good service, and retaining customers in the long run. ADA for websites is a tool that makes websites accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. At the same time, ADA web design will enhance the outlook of your website.

When it comes to business and law firms, websites are a major asset. This is because, with the right website, these firms can take their operational excellence a notch higher. Similarly, if the websites are not adequately accessible, the business will suffer negative consequences. For this reason, businesses and law firms need ADA website compliance.

What Is ADA Website Compliance?

ADA stands for Americans with Disabilities Act Standards for Accessible Design. It is a web accessibility development tool that focuses on making electronic information accessible to people with disabilities. ADA compliance ensures a specific set of tools to provide your websites with these accessible features.

It is a great way to ensure web accessibility remediation for your websites. That means when your websites are ADA accessible, all users, regardless of their disability, can enjoy your services without hassle. Without ADA compliance, you exclude a large majority of disabled people from using the features of your websites.

ADA compliance is not just a tool to make your website look better. It is an obligatory function that must be present on your websites. Following ADA accessibility is a court-mandated order for all federal organizations and firms. So, following ADA website accessibility means that you are following the civil law of the country.

How Can Business And Law Firms Have ADA Accessible Websites?

The best way for business and law firms to have ADA-accessible websites is to follow the ADA compliance checklist. This includes providing some specific tools and features on your website. So, make sure to follow the ADA compliance website checklist to make your website ADA accessible.

The ADA website checklist includes using alt text for pictures. That is, when your website has multiple images and infographics, alt text will help your audience understand them. Similarly, ADA accessibility requires using the correct fonts, themes, and color contrast. Your fonts should not be too difficult to read for screen readers.

ADA-accessible websites will need to use proper headlines and sub-points. This helps readers navigate through extensive content with various information. ADA web design also requires you to use ARIA landmarks like “Skip”, “Jump To”, etc. buttons. Additionally, the website should be keyboard-accessible to benefit people with assistive technologies.

You must conduct a web accessibility audit to get a better understanding of what your website needs. For this, you can get some expert help. Many web accessibility companies can perform these audits. They can also help you with accessible website development for your organization.

Hence, in these ways, you can get ADA-accessible websites for law firms and business organizations.

Why Business And Law Firms Need ADA Website Compliance

If you are new to the idea of ADA website compliance, you might be wondering why you should need it on your websites. There are several advantages to ensuring ADA accessibility on your company’s website. At the same time, without complying with ADA accessibility, your business and law firms may be subjected to different penalties.

When it comes to the advantages of ADA website compliance, there are many. For instance, you can ensure the best services to all your users when you have ADA compliance. This includes the large population of disabled people and users with various physical constraints. Hence, you get to reach a larger audience with ADA compliance.

As a result, you can ensure inclusivity to create a better brand image. Your website will be more likely to satisfy the customers and have better customer retention.

Similarly, with ADA-accessible websites, you get to avoid lawsuits and penalties. According to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, federal agents must have ADA-accessible websites. This includes law firms, accounting firms, CPA firms, etc. Your websites must be ADA accessible. Otherwise, you might face ADA lawsuits and penalties for your inaccessible websites.

Conclusion

ADA website compliance is an obligatory tool that ensures great service and a better user experience for your customers. So, businesses and law firms must abide by the ADA compliance requirements to improve their websites.

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