Having a website for your business isn’t as much a luxury as it is a requirement, these days. Not only do websites provide your customers with a storefront that is open 24/7, a site also provides information they need about your hours, services, and pricing. To stand out, your site needs to be easy to understand and it needs to be designed in such a way that users can navigate it without getting frustrated. It also needs to meet accessibility standards set by the ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act). What do those compliance requirements look like?
Technical ADA Website Compliance
There’s a long list of technical requirements that your site needs to have in order to be considered compliant. These include:
- Having alt tags for images, graphics, and videos
- Adding descriptive text to forms on your site
- Making your hyperlink text descriptive
- Adding subtitles, audio descriptions, and transcripts to all videos on your site
- Having the correct color contrast on your site
Those are just a few of the items you need to take care of if you want to keep your website ADA compliant. In many cases, the cost of bringing a website up to this level of compliance can cost as much as, if not more than, a brand new website.
So, the big question is: do I have to start from scratch in order to get my website into the right shape. Luckily, the answer is no.
Making A Site ADA-Compliant
Good web design is all about making a site as useful as it is beautiful. For decades, the best practices of design have grown alongside accessibility considerations. If you had your site built by a skilled, qualified designer, a lot of your site will probably be compliant as is. But even the best designers miss things. And the requirements of the law aren’t always as clear as we’d like.
But there are plugins and programs that are designed to identify and fix some of the issues that could lead to a lawsuit (or even just a bad user experience on your website). To help your site be ADA-compliant, I use a powerful, AI-based plugin called UserWay.
How UserWay Works
UserWay scans your site to look for instances where compliance requirements aren’t being met. UserWay looks at what your users see when they visit a page on your domain and they take a look under the hood at all of the coding that underlies your site.
It then creates a report that shows every item that needs to be fixed. While that report is valuable in and of itself, what UserWay does next is what sets it apart from other programs that try to do this work. UserWay’s suite of tools can then be used to help tackle these issues. Their Accessibility Widget gives users access to specialized accessibility features while other tools write code to ensure compliance much more quickly than a coder ever could.
Best of all, I can add UserWay to any site and take on the work of getting your site aligned with the ADA requirements FAST. Feel free to reach out to me today to ask any questions or to learn more about pricing.
