ADA and Your Website

What is ADA?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was created in 2010 and outlines guidelines for public organizations to follow to be accessible to people with disabilities. Accessibility includes facilities and places in the real world. It also includes virtual places like the Internet, apps, and other media. For this blog post, we are going to focus specifically on websites.

Depending on your type of business or organization, ADA standards might be mandatory, including on your website. Failure to comply could result in penalties, legal fees, settlements, and PR issues — not to mention the cost of possibly rebuilding your website.

Even if ADA standards don’t apply to your business, they might make good marketing sense for your website. Without compliance, you could miss out on potential customers who cannot interact fully with your website. Ideally, your website should be easily accessible to all users.

Levels

To determine whether your website is ADA-compliant, we follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These Guidelines define three levels of compliance: A, AA, and AAA. To comply, you need to be at AA. However, if possible, you should aim for AAA so that most people can interact effectively with your website.

Principles of WCAG

The four principles of WCAG are known as POUR. POUR stands for perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

• Perceivable – All users should be able to perceive all information on your website, including text, images, etc. To comply, you need to offer alternatives for people to be able to perceive all information; for example, if you have an image, you should have alternative text that can be read by screen reader software for people who can’t see it. That’s important for documents as well. If you don’t have specific documents that can work with a screen reader, ensure that information is available as text on a web page. It is also crucial that the colors of your website have enough contrast so anyone can easily read them. For example, specific colors against others can be challenging to make out to someone with color blindness.
• Operable – All users need to be able to use every feature your site offers. Furthermore, those features need to be in good working order. For example, web forms need to function, embedded media needs to load and play, and web links need to go somewhere.
• Understandable – Using and viewing your website is only one part of WCAG; end-users must understand it. One way to accomplish this is to provide instructions with any tool or feature your website boasts.
• Robust – Usability is essential, but so is giving everyone the same overall experience. The content should be universal so everyone can have an equal experience on your website.

In Conclusion

From a legal and practical standpoint, being ADA-compliant with your website is so very important. If your website is unusable to a chunk of the population, you’re probably missing out on potential customers. Many different tools are available to check your website’s ADA compliance level. You can always reach out to the experts at TDG Agency to make sure your website is free from those mistakes that can come back to bite you in the end.

More Information:
https://www.testpros.com/articles/ada-website-compliance/

Written By:

Derek Olson

Senior Artist

I work in the web development and video production teams at tdg. I do a little bit of everything from web coding to graphic design, animation, and video. I work on a variety of projects both large and small. I am also an illustrator, theater director, playwright, and executive director for a local community theater.