ADA Compliance is More Important Than You Think
When a company builds a physical store, there are a lot of rules and regulations included in the construction. Whether it is ramps for wheelchairs or making sure your building has an accessible bathroom, no business owner would hire a contractor who wouldn’t pay attention to those building rules.
In the same way, you shouldn’t hire a website contractor who won’t help your online website meet those same restrictions. However, it’s not as simple as installing a widget or writing a couple of lines of code. No specific laws exist in the ADA regarding internet usage. For this reason, the courts depend on a variety of sources and precedents to rule on these cases. However, they usually use the WCAG 2.0. The vagueness concerning these rules makes it easy for any small or medium-sized business to experience a lawsuit.
Here at GOA-TECH, we always factor ADA compliance into our website construction and maintenance. With the upswing of lawsuits related to online ADA compliance, it’s more important than ever to make sure your website is compliant. You can check the WCAG 2.0 guidelines on their website.
Here are a few ADA compliance tips to get you started on your journey to ADA compliance.
1: Descriptions
First, you need to make sure that all of the images, videos, text, and audio on your website have both audio and written descriptions. This assists people who are either vision or hearing impaired. This rule extends to everything on your website, from the titles to the menu items to embedded videos.
For example, if you have a photo on your website, there needs to be a description of the photo in the coding that can be read by an assistive device. If there is, say, a photo of a rabbit on one of your blogs, the title of the photo should be something like rabbit_jumping.jpg instead of photo1.jpg.
Another thing commonly done to make a website more accessible in their descriptions is providing alternate captchas. This could include things like a sound-based implementation for vision-impaired people.
2: Appearance
The appearance of a website can also risk ADA lawsuits. There are regulations around the contrast of color between text and background, the ability for text to be resized, and even making sure that people with epilepsy should either be able to use the website without negative effect or be warned of something that might cause an epilepsy attack.
3: Accessibility Control
There are a lot of people who can only navigate through websites by keyboard, from either mobility issues or other accessibility problems. Because of this, website designers have to ensure that their entire website can be navigated only via a keyboard.
Another ADA Compliance Tip is that the potentially harmful content of the website should be able to be controlled in a way to negate their adverse effects. For example, if there is content that blinks, moves, or scrolls, users will be able to stop it.
4: Make it Predictable
The last entry on our ADA Compliance Tips to avoid lawsuits is to make sure that your website is predictable. An easy way to do that is to make sure that the same thing, like a product, is marked consistently marked and linked throughout your website.
Let Us Help!
As you can see above, getting your website to be ADA compliant is not an easy task. But at GOA-TECH, we are ready for the job! Contact us today to get your website up to speed!
