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What is ADA Compliance for websites in USA?
People wonder why they need ADA compliance for website, and here we explain in detail!
The Americans with Disabilities Act passed in the year 1990. It is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against those with disabilities, ensuring they have the same rights and opportunities as those without. This includes individuals coming from all kinds of areas of public life. All public and private places that can be accessed by the general public like schools, transportations and jobs come under this act. Web accessability is the focus point of this act.
There are five titles in the ADA law that relate to different parts of public life. The five titles of the ADA is as written below:
- Title I – employment practices of personal employers with 15 or more employees. This includes state and local governments, employment agencies, labour unions, agents of the employer and joint management-labour committees
- Title II –government programs and activities.
- Title III – private bodies that are considered public accommodation places.
- Title IV– companies related to communications like telephones and internet services should take measures such that the disabled can access them easily
- Title V– miscellaneous provisions list regarding the ADA.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADAA) became a law from 2008. From January 1, 2009, the law came into force for the public. The new Act incorporated several significant changes in itself. Most importantly, the definition of “disability” was more refined. These changes apply to all the five titles of the ADA.
How Important is ADA compliance for a website?
The U.S. Department of Justice added Standards for Accessible Design in the year 2010 to the ADA. This made mandatory the accessibility of all electronic devices and information technology. For example, websites to those with disabilities, irrespective of what kind they were suffering from.
Failure in maintaining an ADA–compliant website may result in the filing of a lawsuit. This will lead to financial liabilities and damage to the brand reputation. However, if your website is ADA compliant then you need not worry about that. Instead, you might attract even more potential customers.
The ADA requires certain businesses to create accommodations for people with disabilities. Americans with Disabilities Act lays down that web page should be accessible to blind users, deaf users. This also includes people who must navigate by voice, screen readers or other assistive technologies. It is important to note that businesses that fall under Title 1, or Title III, are covered by the ADA.
Keep safe from lawsuits
Open your website to everyone
Boost your brand perception
Who needs to follow these requirements?
Is ADA compliance required for all websites in USA? If you are wondering whether the rules apply to your business or not, keep reading. Usually, the Americans Disabilities Act (ADA) standards apply to commercial and public entities. These have “places of public accommodation” which includes the internet. Although the guidelines for it are still not clearly stated by the DOJ. However, this does not mean that website discrimination against the disabled will be tolerated by the court.
There is a list of all those organisations that compulsorily need to adhere to the ADA guidelines. State and local government agencies and private employers that function with 15 or more employees should take care of making their content ADA compliant. It also includes businesses that operate for the benefit of the public.
As we know, ADA encompasses electronic and information technology. Like the Internet and the websites on it, ADA is bound to affect all businesses and webmasters. Therefore many industries are making sure that their sites don’t ignore ADA requirements intentionally. Although, it is always a good idea to create a site that everyone can get access to.
Ignorance Is No Excuse. If Your Site
Isn't Compliant, You Can Be Sued!
Unfortunately, even if you didn’t know about the laws that govern ADA compliance – you could still wind up losing 10’s of thousands of dollars. As a matter of fact, some of these ‘legal experts’ actually prey on unsuspecting individuals like yourself.
How does a company comply with the ADA?
The main aim of ADA is to encourage self-regulation of accessibility standards. The Department of Justice is currently working on developing regulations for making websites ADA compliant. They are looking forward to providing specific guidance to the entities covered by the ADA. As of now, usage of WCAG 2.0 level AA guidelines as a guide on how to become accessible is encouraged. This will be our main source until DOJ comes up with some concrete regulations.
The guide outlines the gold standards for ADA website compliance, which include:
- Text alternatives
- Time-based media
- Keyboard accessibility
- Navigation
- Readability
and more…
You can also consult the ANORM notice posted on July 26, 2010. That is if you are more interested in the information on the proposed rulemaking by the DOJ.
What happens if your website isn’t ADA compliant?
Unfortunately, if your website isn’t made ADA compliant you will be liable to anyone filing a case against you discriminating against the disabled however unintentional it might be. The lawsuit will entail the inability to access your website by the disabled. In turn, you might end up paying thousands of dollars in lawsuits when you didn’t even intend to exclude such people from accessing your website.
This means you will be losing out on a lot of business. If your website doesn’t rank high on the search results page or customers are unable to navigate your website you might lose important leads and sales opportunities. Moreover, ADA compliance makes your website easy to go through by Google bots. It also helps push up your ranking and in turn getting more people to pay attention to your website.
Laura Ferrugia, the marketing strategist for Miles Technologies has even commented on this. She said that, “If users with disabilities struggle to complete forms and make purchases on your website, you could be losing out on potential customers”. She added, “Plus, many of the rules for ADA compliance also help websites with search engine optimization.”
Although the term ADA compliance is still subjective for now. However, it’s not too difficult to discern what “reasonable accessibility” means.
All you need to do is make a good faith effort to achieve reasonable accessibility for anyone who reaches your webpage. By doing it right, any business can be successful in developing a compliant website and hence avoiding potential lawsuits. However, if you have an interest in knowing more about the process to protect your business from legal lawsuits, you might consider consulting with a disability attorney.
No One Is Safe
Doesn't Matter If You're
A CEO
An Online Marketer
A Local Consultant
A Web Developer
A Affiliate Marketer
An Ecommerce Store Owner
A Doctor Chiropractor etc
A Local Business Owner
A Realtor
Any Type of Profession
Why do we require ADA Compliance?
Imagine millions of people not being able to access your website just because it is not ADA compliant. It won’t be very good for business. It makes your website accessible to the disabled. The design also helps your site provide a great (UX). It is a link between website accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO).
Website accessibility and SEO
As we said above, making your website ADA compliant will aid in your SEO efforts. But how is that possible?
The ADA compliant design makes your web page more relevant for Google. In addition to that, it also helps improve the time on site, and UX — all factors which impact your SEO.
These will encourage more people to enjoy the positive influence of your website. Otherwise, they’ll “bouncing back” in search of some other, probably a better one. Now, these factors play an important role in boosting the trust that Google has for your webpage. As you result this might improve your rankings to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). On the other hand, if your website remains inaccessible and not easy to use for the disabled, you will risk losing a lot of SEO traffic, leads and revenue.
Just take a look at these statistics when it comes to ADA compliance
What do we do as an ADA compliance agency in USA?
Now you have learnt everything that you need to know about ADA compliance. The question that remains is how should you achieve it. To answer it, we are here at your service. Let us now talk about how we help your website become ADA compliant to benefit your organisation.
Make use of the WCAG 2.0 guidelines
The guidelines for making your website perfectly accessible is written down in the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. It outlines several recommendations or goals for making your website ADA accessible to users across the U.S. Hence is entirely trustworthy. Take a look at the core principles of the WCAG that we will work on:
- Perceivable: This means that you allow users the ability to perceive the information you are trying to convey. This should happen irrespective of the fact that whether they are able or not. If a user is not able to view something you need to give an appropriate alternative for it.
- Operable: the capability to navigate through your website easily is what being operable means.
- Understandable: Using this concept we help you make your content easily comprehensible by the users. This will include being able to understand the text, images, videos, tools and more.
- Robust: This enables every disabled person to experience your website in the same way as an abled person would
This might seem like a lot to do. But, you can easily make your website ADA accessible by following the WCAG checklist that compiles all their principles. It consists of three levels:
- Level A: Only some users can access this kind of website
- Level AA: Most of the internet users are able to navigate this
- Level AAA: All kind of users irrespective of their disability can access this website
Most organisations must meet at least the AA level requirements.
Unless You Make This Change To your Website Immediately
You Could be Sued,(Even Extorted)
People All Over Are Losing A ton of Money Because of This. But, I’m Going to Show You How To Make Sure It Never Happens To You
WCAG 2.1 & ADA Compliance
Certification & Statement
Accessibility statement and certification of performance
Daily Compliance Monitoring
Re-scanning and fixing accessibility issues every 24 hours
Monthly Compliance Auditing
Emailing you a professional compliance audit every month
How do we help address accessibility issues?
Here are some of the most common ways that will help you achieve ADA compliance on your website.
- Creating Alt tags for all your images, videos and audios. This allows people with disabilities to read or hear alternative descriptions of the content.
- Creating text transcripts for videos and audios. This helps the hearing impaired people to understand the content.
- Identifying the site’s language in the header code. This code gives an early impression of what language to use. Then the text reader and they function accordingly.
- Offering alternative suggestions when the user encounters input errors is another way of doing it. This will help the disabled to easily navigate through your website.
- A consistent and organised layout will work wonders. We help you design the interface in such a way that they are clear from one another. Also, one can easily navigate throughout the entire site.
What disabilities does it cover?
Catering to the needs of the disabled is not a piece of cake. However, we try our best to make your website easily accessible to them through our services. We install features that when used by people with disabilities will prove worth their time.
We make sure that any disability is not an obstacle while navigating through your website. Some of these disabilities include:
- Web accessibility for blind people: Optimised website using image recognition by screen readers.
- Web accessibility for people with motor impairments: Making it easy to navigate the website through a keyboard.
- Web accessibility for the elderly and people with cognitive impairments: We achieve this by providing a built-in expression, slang, and phrase dictionaries to aid with comprehension.
- Web accessibility for people with epilepsy: Help in automatically stop blinking and animations with a single click
- Web accessibility for people with visual impairments: by adjusting the colour or fonts in the content or increasing the size.
