If the websites you design don’t comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), your clients could end up in court over web accessibility-related issues.
The ADA is a civil rights law that aims to guarantee equal opportunity and access for persons with disabilities in public accommodations (including the internet and online spaces), telecommunications, transportation, and more. As a result, websites have to be ada compliant as well.
Things like the lack of keyboard navigation functionalities on your client website and other non-accessible elements that do not allow effective user experience for disabled users can be considered as violations of the ADA and lead to lawsuits. Therefore, a web owner needs to consult with a specialized agency like “Accessibility Spark” that can readily help adhere to and strictly follow the ADA compliance website checklist for making any site 100% WCAG compliant, thereby avoiding future lawsuits filed by users or site visitors. In this way, your company website reaches out to a maximum audience and gets a higher online visibility.
This means that what you need to know about UI and UX design should no longer be limited to conversion and sales elements, but must also include accessibility to ensure ADA compliance.
To help you understand what the ADA is and equip your team in building compliant and accessible websites, let’s take a closer look at the vital points that digital agencies should know about ADA compliance.
1. What the ADA is all about
The ADA is a law that provides prohibitions on discriminating against people based on their disabilities in various areas, including “public accommodations.”
Businesses, whether physical or in digital form, are included under “public accommodations,” and the ADA requires that disabled individuals are not denied the benefits of the services or excluded from participation in such spaces.
Ultimately, the ADA aims to direct businesses to make reasonable modifications to usual operations processes to accommodate people with disabilities.
Although the ADA provides general requirements for effective communication and equal access, it doesn’t offer specific guidelines for legal compliance yet.
However, the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) 2.1 level AA has been frequently referenced by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the US courts as criteria in assessing a site’s accessibility — making it the safest standard, along with the ADA requirements, to follow.
That being said, the ADA allows you flexibility in following the requirements in creating accessible client websites, and your safest bet would be to meet the latest version of the WCAG Level AA success criteria to be legally compliant.
2. Guidelines for compliance and web accessibility
As mentioned previously, one of the best ways to get started with web accessibility and ADA compliance (including the ADA general requirements) for your client websites is by following the WCAG 2.1 guidelines – the latest version of the standards.
The WCAG 2.1 resource outlines goals or recommendations for making your ADA accessible websites and offers three levels (Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA) that you can follow to achieve compliance and web accessibility.
To make your client websites ADA compliant with the WCAG 2.1 Level AA guidelines, here are some of the rules for you to follow.
- Images of text. Using web images that present mostly text for conveying your content is not recommended unless they are essential or customizable for the users.
If you must, use them with CSS instead to allow for text stylizing.
- Text spacing. No loss of functionality or content should occur in the content you implement using markup languages that support text style properties like the line height, spacing following paragraphs, letter spacing (tracking), and word spacing.
- Non-text contrast. Against adjacent colors, the visual presentation of your user interface components and graphical objects should have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1.
This includes your visual information that is required to identify UI states and components and parts of your graphics that are required to understand your content.
By following the rules for web accessibility in the WCAG 2.1 guidelines and applying them to your web design, you’ll be helping your client websites become ADA compliant.
3. Making websites accessible can be easy.
Some of the challenges that you might face with building ADA-compliant client websites are the costs, the limitations that accessibility can have on your design, and the many hours it can take to ensure the site is accessible at all times.
Web accessibility platforms like accessiBe, however, can help you make fully accessible websites, make the entire process less of a time-suck, and with no need to keep your design constantly in check for ADA compliance.
accessiBe offers a fully automated platform and AI-powered technology that can help you create websites that comply with the ADA and the WCAG 2.1 — which is the most recent version of the WCAG.
accessiBe’ AI technology works by learning the components of your client websites — from your headers down to your footers — and using a set of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) attributes to provide meaningful data for screen readers used by blind users.
Upon landing on your client website, users will get an automatic prompt to turn on screen reader adjustments, and they only need to press Alt+1 on their keyboards to enable it.
The platform also uses machine learning techniques to adjust your client website’s HTML, and add different behaviors to make the site fully accessible for your users using keyboard navigation.
Plus, with accessiBe’s accessibility adjustments interface, users can choose how they want to use your client websites by adjusting colors, content, display, and more according to their disability.
With automated solutions like this, you can cut down on your workload, design the site however you want, and still ensure full web accessibility and ADA compliance for your client websites.
4. Web accessibility is good for business
Aside from complying with legislation and avoiding potential accessibility-related lawsuits, there are other benefits to ADA and WCAG compliance.
For one thing, following ADA requirements and WCAG guidelines can make your website easier to navigate and more user-friendly.
For instance, achieving web accessibility requires your client website to allow people to find anything on the site quickly, and this is something that could acquire from user experience agency.
This can help your clients increase their potential leads and establish a loyal customer base.
An accessible design can even help you improve your SERP rankings because a wider audience can use your site, consume your content, avail of your online services, and more.
ADA compliance is also good for the reputation of your clients because making their websites accessible shows users that they do not discriminate and make every effort for equal access.
On your part, building accessible websites show your clients and potential customers that you are a digital agency that will help them create or redesign sites for ADA compliance.
After all, providing services that help your clients comply with the web accessibility regulations, fulfill legal obligations, and provide equal access for people with disabilities are excellent ways to boost your brand awareness and close more deals.
Final Thoughts
Fulfilling the requirements set by the ADA might be overwhelming, but non-compliance is not an option and not worth the legal and moral implications.
With potential accessibility-related lawsuits and the negative impacts it can have on your clients and your digital agency, investing in ADA compliance has more worth than facing the consequences of building non-accessible websites.
Did you learn something new about web accessibility and ADA compliance from this post? Please share this with your network if you agree. Cheers!
