Making your website ADA compliant is essential to ensure that people with disabilities can access and navigate your website easily.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that businesses and organizations make their websites accessible to people with disabilities. It requires every public sector business to make their services/products compatible and accessible for people with disabilities. This not only helps you avoid potential legal issues, but it also demonstrates your commitment to inclusivity and accessibility.
In this context, there are five key steps you can take to make your website ADA compliant. These steps include conducting an accessibility audit, providing alternative text for images and multimedia, ensuring proper document structure, making sure your website is keyboard accessible, and ensuring proper color contrast.
Let’s see what exactly it means for a website to be ADA compliant and how you can achieve it.
ADA Compliance in a Nutshell
You might be thinking, what difference would an ADA-compliant website make? For you and me, it may not be any different but for the disabled, it can be troublesome to access the website tools and services.
For instance, a person with color blindness may have difficulty accessing the website with green and gray contrast. Thus, ADA compliance for websites mandates businesses to provide auxiliary aids and services to people with disabilities.
Though there are no enforceable ADA legal standards for website accessibility, there are trusted standards known as WCAG.
Companies in the US are not legally bound to apply ADA to their websites, however, they can still get stuck in a lawsuit. But that should not be the actual reason to have an ADA compliant website. So, why does it matter?
5 steps to make your website ADA compliant
Let us understand some of the steps through which you will be able to make your site ADA compliant and avoid any legal action or penalties imposed.
Find an ADA agency
First of all, find an ADA website compliance agency with experience in platforms that your website uses. Next, ask them about ADA compliance testing and how their design and development workflow addresses accessibility.
If the company provides responsive website design that means it has already covered most of the elements of the ADA compliance website. You must also look for agencies that include experience with different tools that access the site accessibility.
Audit your website code
Next step, audit your website code. The tools used for testing the code will crawl, check, and identify every element/area that doesn’t meet web accessibility standards for ADA compliance.
The result will provide you with a list of work required and an idea of the budget. Each website configuration varies and so does the ADA audit cost.
What if your website is fairly compliant? You will have to put in fewer efforts and resources.
Determine effort level to become website ADA compliant
You have the reports in your hand. Now, go to your development/design partner and ask about the overall level of effort it will require to revamp or design your website from scratch.
A good design partner will provide you with an estimate by checking on the requirements, budget, timelines, proposed deliverables, and some compliance expectation management.
Put in the work
When the project is appropriately road-mapped, it is time to work on it. The development team will initiate work and communicate about the changes that will affect user experience.
Stay up-to-date on website ADA compliance standards
Website compliance is not a one-time task. The compliance standards constantly change so the changes must be implemented periodically.
Why should your website be ADA-compliant?
If you are wondering about the benefits of becoming ADA compliant, these five reasons will convince you surely.
Website ADA Compliance Increases target audience
There are nearly 61 million people with disabilities in the U.S. alone. Consequently, making a compliant websites means you get to understand and target these 61 million people as well.
Improves SEO efforts
WCAG provides accessibility to screen readers, and these readers crawl your website pages similarly to search engines.
Website ADA Compliance Builds reputation
You will not only get more customers but they will know how thoughtful your business is which will increase their and others’ trust in your brand.
Better usability
With quick navigation and easy access, everyone impaired or not will be able to find the information easily.
Avoid Penalties
Update your webpages to be compliant with WCAG 2.0 Guidelines to avoid stiff penalties and legal fees.
Who we are?
codemantra is a leading Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) Solutions Provider. Its AI-driven platform automates digital document accessibility compliance; captures, classifies, and extracts data; and transforms documents to the desired output format.
How codemantra helps?
The platform accessibilityInsight makes PDFs accessible and compliant with PDF U/A and WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. Our accessibility compliance services helps to make documents in multiple formats (Excel, Word, PPT, e Pub) accessible to people with disabilities.
We provide everything from self-help tools, audits, remediation, and implementation support to help you stay on top of accessibility challenges with a very cost-effective solution.
Contact us at 1 (800) 769-9715. Email us at engage@codemantra.com for more information on how to make your documents accessible.
