The American Disability Act (ADA) provides laws, guidelines, and regulations as well as design standards to help ensure that American businesses are accessible to people with disabilities.
*Important: We are not attorneys and this should not be considered legal council. Our approach to website accessibility is to help businesses make their content available to a wider audience and provide more value to their visitors.
Does your business need to have an ADA Compliant website?
We recommend that every business implement an accessibility solution. People with disabilities face significant challenges when navigating websites and improving accessibility can go a long way to help. It also reduces the likelihood of your business from being sued. An added advantage is improving the code of your website will often improve how it performs in search engines (Google, Bing, etc.).
The number of lawsuits related to website accessibility has increased significantly year over year. While no solution can prevent someone from suing you, a good website accessibility solution can help significantly reduce the likelihood of someone filing a lawsuit against your business.
Our Approach to Website Accessibility
There are two areas that we focus on specific to website accessibility:
- Improving your website’s structure, code, and content; and,
- Adding a layer of accessibility tools
The cost of implementation varies based on the size and complexity of your website. To get started we offer a free consultation.
Improving your website’s structure, code, and content
The most common problems with websites lacking ADA compliance include a non-responsive website design, images lacking alt text, proper HTML tags, and contrast of colors and fonts.
A responsive design allows the display of your website to conform to the size of the user’s device whether they are on a desktop computer, mobile device or tablet. The user won’t need to pinch and zoom to properly view the content. Responsive websites are also commonly referred to as mobile-friendly websites.
IImage alt text is used by screen readers to help people that are blind or visually impaired. The image alt text properly describes each image displayed on a webpage so the user has a better understanding of what each image is.
There are tools that help fix some of these issues but the majority of the work is done by analyzing your website and manually inputting the necessary changes.
Adding a layer of accessibility tools
On our WSI Connect website, we use a tool from AccessiBe that provides additional accessibility functionality. It is accessed by clicking on the International Symbol of Access (handicap symbol) icon in the lower left corner. Here is a screenshot of what the tool looks like.
This tool helps provide a better user experience for people with impairments such as blindness, motor and mobility limitations, color blindness, epilepsy, and blurred vision.
It also provides an “Accessibility Statement” outlining how their tool helps with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1:
Implementation of AccessiBe is done by adding a single line of code and works on CMS platforms such as WordPress WIX, Joomla, and Shopify. It can also be implemented via Google Tag Manager.
Next Steps
Before you move forward with any tool, it is important that you conduct a proper assessment to ensure that it meets your specific requirements. We can help. Contact WSI Connect today to request an ADA assessment for your website.
