Over the years, you've certainly heard a lot of chatter about ADA compliance. If you were left wondering what all of this means for your business and website, we've covered you! Let us look at more closely what the ADA is, what compliance feels like, and how you can push the website in the right direction. The American with Disabilities Act or ADA is a comprehensive piece of civil rights legislation that provides all persons equal access to products and services, regardless of disability.
This now extends to internet accessibility in our modern era as well. Websites that serve to the general public should ensure their content is accessible to everyone. In making your website ADA compliant, not only do you keep your business up to speed with the law, but you also open your business to new customers.
The Americans with Disabilities Act or ADA was developed in 1990 and Is meant to ensure that disabled people have the same privileges as anybody else. This means that any business that serves the public must ensure that their building accommodates different sorts of people with disabilities, and now as the internet is so widely used, compliance with ADA also extends to websites and even mobile applications. This implies your site must be accessible to people with disabilities that affect their vision, hearing, or physical abilities.
Recently, a ruling was passed that declared the official standard of website accessibility for businesses. Title III of the ADA mandated that all "places of public accommodation" be required by law to eliminate any "barriers of access" that would prevent a person with disabilities from accessing the goods or services of the company.
If you are not certain if your website is compatible with ADA and you're wondering if it's worth looking into, you may be persuaded by these benefits of doing so.
Compliance with ADA will boost your SEO efforts.
Search engines are now changing more than ever, to crawl pages with more human purpose. A key component of WCAG is accessibility to screen readers, and these readers crawl your website pages similarly to search engines. If your site meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, it will likely appeal to screen readers, search engines, and users alike, ultimately improving your SEO endeavors. For this purpose, alternative image text, meta-tagging, and video transcripts should be seriously considered.
Compliance with the ADA increases the target audience.
If your site is not already ADA compliant, millions of potential customers who are unable to access your site because of their disabilities are automatically missing out. There are nearly 50 million disabled people in the U.S., which means that about 19 percent of this country has a disability. Many of them may be interested in your products or services, but they will not be able to navigate once they arrive at your website quickly enough to buy anything or even contact you, all because your site is accessible only to persons with no disabilities. Hence, they may move on to your competitors.
For example, if you have a video that shows your product's benefits, but it doesn't have captions, then people who are hard of hearing or deaf won't get to find out how amazing your product is. The same happens when you have images that have no alternate text. The point of the alternative text is to enable screen-reading tools to explain the image to a blind person, so if you don't have the text, some of your viewers will lose out. Similarly, it’s vital to ensure your website is fully accessible without a mouse so that people with physical limitations can use it.
ADA Compliance helps in brand Reputation
The fact that a website that is compliant with ADA can increase your target audience by millions is just one of the reasons to make your site more accessible. Another advantage is that you will not only get more customers, but these customers will also understand how valuable they are for your organization. After all, they may have gone to a few other websites that were not compliant with ADA, each time they were disappointed that they could not access the content until they got to your site.
And as soon as those new customers tell their friends and family how they found your website, many people will know you made sure to make it ADA compliant. You'll be separated from your competitors by the fact that you put this effort into ensuring everyone is included. So making your site compliant with ADA is a wonderful way to get some positive press for your organization.
ADA Compliance Allows Overall Improved Website Usability
Overall, designing a website that is more navigable and operable would help all users while still following the WCAG guidelines. Making your websites more comprehensible will enable everyone-disabled or not - to find what they’re looking for quickly. If you chose to follow the guidelines, your site would certainly convert more leads across the board as users will be confident they will always be able to find the content they need easily.
You Can Avoid Penalties
The text in the ADA did not initially mention websites since this technology was not widely used in 1990. And now that most businesses have a website, they need to ensure that it's accessible to all. As we're past the ruling date, all updated pages on your site need to be a complaint of at least grade A, with grade AAA being the highest.
In recent years, hundreds of respected companies were hit with major lawsuits before the standards were even set in stone. Businesses, including Foot Locker, Fordham University, Brooks Brothers, and even Kylie Jenner, have been sued for the absence of ADA compliant sites.
Currently, there is already a safe harbor clause that allows the existing content to stay as it is unless it has been changed after 18 January 2018. The guidelines, however, do apply to any page revised after that date. So if you want to evade the legal expenses of finding yourself non-compliant with the ADA, it’s best to make the required changes to your site now.
If you’re unsure where to get started, You can contact vicdigit the best web design agency, to determine if your website is ADA-compliant at the moment, and how you can change it if not.