Is Your Website Ada Compliant?

It offers equal access and opportunity to people with disabilities, allowing them to participate more actively within the society. So, if your website is not accessible you are inadvertently discriminating and also impacting your brand exposure and visibility and ability to reach potential audience.

Recognizing the importance of accessibility, both, governments and businesses are increasingly adopting the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. However, the number of inaccessible websites still remain pretty high. Let’s look at why there’s value in making your web content accessible from both business as well as compliance perspective.

Accessibility matters

Approximately one billion people worldwide suffer from some form of disability and the number is growing. Which means there is a critical need to improve accessibility in order to cater to the needs of growing population of individuals with disabilities. And in the wake of unprecedented rise of digitization where almost every service and source of information is available over the web – web accessibility has taken a center stage. Therefore, governments and legislators across the world are taking steps to ensure websites are made accessible. And with disability rights movement rapidly expanding around the world, this trend is gaining significant momentum.  

In a nutshell, this is why you need to ensure web accessibility – accessible web content helps ensure compliance and alleviate potential legal risk, enhance users’ experience and brand image and helps expand reach and drive better business outcomes.

Web accessibility guidelines

The W3C is an international community of experts working together to develop web standards. The Web Accessibility initiative is aimed at maximizing accessibility and the potential of the web. The accessibility guidelines known as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) is a comprehensive and accepted set of standards followed across the world.

Apart from this, websites are also required to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for Accessible Design. According to these standards all electronic and information technology must be accessible to people with disabilities. ADA is yet to define their own set of regulations, but until then The Department of Justice (DOJ) has encouraged organizations to follow WCAG 2.0 level AA guidelines to ensure compliance.

In addition, Australia’s Disability Discrimination Act, Ontario’s Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) and the European Commission also use WCAG 2.0 to educate content developers and help businesses comply with accessibility norms.

Importance of web accessibility testing

Without undergoing a comprehensive accessibility testing, you can not be certain that your website is usable by people with disabilities. The only way to ensure that your website and any other digital content is fully accessible to people with disabilities is to run web accessibility test.

Some of the common accessibility issues include page headings not marked up properly, CAPTCHAs (additional security level) that use images and require user to see them or sites designed in a way that it is difficult to navigate using a keyboard. Some of these could be significant roadblocks to accessibility and if you skip accessibility test these issues can surface later, making your website inaccessible and noncompliant.

Performing accessibility tests

Comprehensive accessibility testing involves testing each function (form submission, product or information search, etc) and extensive manual evaluation of individual pages. While the tests can be automated, the best approach is a combination of both manual as well as automated tests to fully test multiple features, specifications and functions.

Businesses, sometimes try to perform accessibility testing on their own, however, they often lack the expertise, tools and tests needed to identify and resolve every accessibility barrier. It is therefore recommended to let experts handle this testing who have knowledge about how assistive technology works and comprehensive understanding of web accessibility.

Web accessibility goes beyond compliance

While the primary focus of web accessibility is to provide access to people who are differently abled, it also offers substantial benefits to businesses. Besides legal compliance, when done well, web accessibility can deliver superior and inclusive experience to every visitor without compromising the general user experience and improve your market reach.

Springbord creates more accessible web content by supporting the creation of accessibility metadata. Step-by-step process of thoroughly and diligently checking, removing barriers and making a website accessible for all users.