How ADA Compliance Can Affect Your Law Firm Website Ranking?

The Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, has become an important part of modern websites. The main purpose of the ADA is to ensure accessibility for all. And this is especially important for law firm websites in the digital era. So much so that ADA compliance can affect your website’s ranking.

ADA compliance can affect your website’s ranking. This is due to the overlap between increasing accessibility and search engine optimization. The increased accessibility results in a much better user experience and more interaction. When it comes to website ranking and SEO, increasing the interaction of your page with the user is very important, improving your ranking.

In this article, we will talk about how it affects your ranking and how our ADA compliance company can help you. We will go into more detail about web accessibility and improving your website’s ranking, as well as how your law firm’s website can benefit more from ADA compliance. So, keep reading!

How ADA Compliance Affects Your Law Firm Website Ranking

Your page’s law firm website web ranking matters a great deal. A higher ranking means people can find it with more ease. On the other hand, a lower-ranking could lead to it being lost among the many other websites. ADA compliance can help you with your web ranking due to its overlap with search engine optimization (SEO).

Metadata

Metadata is the primary information that comes up in search listings. This data includes the meta title or title tag and the meta description. Both are very important for a good website ranking. Meta titles give those using a screen reader or other assistive tools an idea of what the site contains. As a result, the page is now more accessible to them.

This helps the user quickly tell the difference between the multiple search results just from the title. Most assistive tools read the title tags first, so having a title that represents the site makes it more accessible. Overall, this improves the user’s experience with your website.

Descriptive Alternate Text

Text alternatives to images present on a page are very important for both ADA compliance and SEO. Alternate texts are HTML attribute values that are used to describe the image. The alternate text does not mean a caption, though any assistive tool can read the caption as well as these. Alternate text is not usually visible to normal users and is attached to the image’s URL.

This feature is to help those with visual impairments understand what the image is. Their assistive device, like a screen reader, can read the descriptive text and explain it to them. As a result, you will make your website more accessible to a wider range of people.

But the alternate text also plays a vital role in website ranking. Google’s crawlers can read these texts and can relate the meaning of the image based on this description. Thus, giving Google a better idea about the contents of your website helps them rank it higher. Not to mention increasing the likelihood of the image appearing in Google search results.

Accessible Web Design

When it comes to web ranking, just having your page online is not enough. You need to get users to interact with your website. But this can prove to be difficult if you are overly complicated. One of the first things you should consider is whether your webpage is easy to navigate and makes sense.

Making your website attractive and clear greatly improves user interaction and accessibility. Have internal links on your page like HTML sitemaps, calls to action, and breadcrumbs. These can help those with disabilities interact with your site, but also makes it easier for the crawler to explore your site.

You should consider the disabilities of individuals while designing the user interface. This makes it possible for them to interact with your page even with assistive devices.

Video and Audio Transcription

Video and audio transcription are textual descriptions. This is very helpful to those with disabilities that prevent them from understanding these. But it also provides a crawler with a large amount of text to go through and improve your website’s ranking.

This not only helps people with disabilities, but also those that cannot access the audio due to being out in public. Or people in countries with very slow internet connections, giving them an alternative to watching the video. This can provide a huge boost to the engagement of your video and audio content.

Link Anchor Text

Link anchors, like title tags, play an important role in your website’s ranking and accessibility. They provide assistive devices with more information about the target page and what it is about. So, write a descriptive link anchor that gives your user a clear idea of what that page contains.

Similarly, the search engine crawler can read these link anchors as well. Thus, providing them with enough data to recommend your page more and thus improve your website’s ranking.

Heading Tag Structures

Heading tags are usually more important for search engine optimization. However, they are also very important for navigating with assistive devices like screen readers. Search engines give more priority to large-sized texts. As a result, this creates an influx of people writing keyword-rich headings, even if they are not structured properly.

But having a more structured head tag order makes your website more accessible. Being more ordered increases the likelihood that these large texts will align with the right pages. Lastly, your page will look much more structured, attracting more attention than an unstructured page.

Benefits Of ADA Compliance For Law Firm Website

You may be asking yourself, why your law firm should make their web page more accessible. And what can you gain by doing this? Let us look at some of the reasons your law firm should consider more ADA-compliant websites.

Better For Business

Attorneys should make their sites accessible to the disabled for more business. The main objectives of a law firm’s website are to inform, educate, and market to potential clients. Making your website more accessible to those with disabilities increases your potential clients. But moreover, this is the right thing to do.

ADA compliance makes your site more usable and understandable to individuals with disabilities. Everybody needs a lawyer, even individuals with disabilities. By not making your website more accessible, you are depriving them of the service they need. But at the same time, you are also losing prospective clients.

If you want more information, check out this article on our page about why the ADA is so important for law firms.

Reputation

Like in any other business, reputation is very important. So, if a firm is seen to be creating hurdles for an individual with disabilities to seek their service, it can severely affect their reputation. Some clients may even turn away from a law firm that acts in this manner.

On the other hand, you can gain a better reputation for being more inclusive and welcoming. Thus, attracting more customers and making a name for your firm as a responsible company.

If you want more info as to why you should make your website more ADA compliant, take a look at this article on Top reasons for ADA Compliance.

How We Can Help You

Above, we mentioned how ADA compliance can help your website rank. But, doing this very task on your own can prove to be difficult at times. How do you know if your website is perceivable, understandable, operable, and robust enough for everyone to use? That is where we come in.

ADA for Web can help with setting up your website to be more accessible for everyone. By downloading our Check List we can help you maintain the level of accessibility that you want for your specific website.

Tracking how accessible your website is on your own is quite a hassle. As the compliance is revised, you will need to check in on your website on a regular basis. With how often these regulations change, this would become extremely necessary and require a decent chunk of your time.

But running a law firm on its own is quite exhausting, so why not let us handle this tedious task? We are an ADA-compliant company. And as such, we can easily handle this tedious task for you. So, you can focus on your mission to bring justice to your clients.

By letting us handle your website, it will become more efficient and increase your interaction with those who visit your page.

Conclusion

In this article, we covered the interesting topic of ADA compliance for website ranking. We talked about how ADA compliance can affect your website ranking. As well as some other benefits it has and how our ADA compliance company can help you. Get in touch with us to begin integrating ADA compliance into your website.

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