American law ensures that people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. In order to mandate this law, every commercial website must confirm to the standards defined in the ADA compliance guidelines. When a website fails to meet the standards for accessible design, it results in a two-way loss for a business:
- It prevents your potential customers with disabilities to access the products and services you are offering.
- It may lead to lawsuits that cause financial loss.
Why check a website for ADA compliance?
If you fail to consider the needs of your target audience, which might be disabled, it could affect your business growth objectives substantially as one in five Americans has some sort of disability – that is over twenty million possible customers! Your services should be accessible to everyone no matter if they have a hearing impairment, vision loss or any other disability. For sufficient digital accessibility, you need to implement a website accessibility checker. Implementing an ADA compliant website test is helpful in many ways:
- Your business is safe against lawsuits and complaints.
- ADA compliance is also good for your reputation management.
- Your content will reach a wider segment of the target audience.
- Using website accessibility tools is also helpful to improve SEO rankings.
- It gives you a competitive edge over others and also improves your brand identity.
How to check if a website is ADA compliant?
Thanks to technology, ADA website testing has become quick and easy. All you need is to run a scan of your website URL on your choice of website accessibility tool and you
can find out the problem areas to be fixed.
Using the latest suite of evaluation tools ensure that you are focusing on the website accessibility checklist. The results would highlight the key accessibility concerns related to contrast, navigation, image alt-text, broken or empty links, video subtitles and more.
How to make your website accessible to people with disabilities?
In order to adhere to ADA compliance, businesses need to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Currently, there are three versions of WCAG, which include bare minimum accessibility, target level accessibility and a level of exceeding the standards. Depending on the nature of your business and your preferences, you can adhere to the WCAG and achieve the objectives of having an accessible business website.
Using a website accessibility tool is a great starting point, though these tools don’t offer results with 100% accuracy. Free accessibility software scans are a quick and reliable way to find dead links, color contrasts and minor concerns like flashing or flickering effects; though it doesn’t provide the accuracy and comprehensive scope from human evaluation. Therefore, you might need to develop a website that doesn’t rely solely on computer programs for accessibility standards but also employ human intelligence for the purpose; while this programs are helpful, they only run at about a 30% accuracy. Qualified and highly trained professionals can detect accessibility issues faced by people with neurological or cognitive disabilities which are hard to be detected by a website accessibility checker. Conducting manual audits is recognized as the most trusted way to make content accessible to everyone and the best way to minimize your website’s exposure for a lawsuit.
Conclusion
Those who think that their website is not ADA compliant can start by assessing it with help of a website accessibility checklist. Use free tools in conjunction with certified manual audits for ADA compliance. If you are interested in requesting a manual audit, consider visiting the link given below.