Websites and ADA Compliance
Your company’s website serves as the front door to your business
It’s often the first place a potential customer will visit to find out more about your company.
Whether it's to describe more about the product and services offered, pricing, location or company mission, a website is vital to a company’s existence. Without a website you may actually drive customers away.
That’s why it’s important to spend time creating a quality website to promote your business. But even after devoting hours to creating the perfect website and working hard to maximize its SEO potential, you still might be missing something crucial.
There’s an important step that is often overlooked … Is your website ADA compliant?
It's an important piece of your website that, if missing could isolate a significant part of the population.
Making Your Website ADA Compliant
The good news is that there are many steps you can take to make sure your website is ADA compliant. It’s important to create your website from the user’s perspective. Here are a few tips to get you started.
Use alt text to describe images. Words can truly be used to paint a picture and alt text is used to describe an image for the visually impaired using a screen reader. The benefit of alt text is two-fold and can also help boost a website’s SEO ranking.
Navigation friendly. Many people with physical limitation are unable to use a mouse to navigate your website. It’s important to enable keyboard navigation so that every aspect of your website is accessible.
Increase user time. While conveying as much information about your business as possible is a major component of marketing your website, it’s important to take a step back and make sure users have enough time to experience all of the elements of your site.
Simplify content and design. Avoid excessive crowding of text and images and poor color contrasts to create a more simplistic style that’s easier for all users to understand. To accommodate visitors that may suffer from epilepsy or other physical medical conditions, it’s important to remember that elements on the page should not flash more than three times per second or create any other type of strobe effect.
Provide audio and visual alternatives. It’s important to use alt text and videos to accommodate the visually impaired visitors to your site while at the same time providing transcripts and interpretation for hearing-impaired visitors.
Website and ADA Compliancy Support
Building and maintaining a website is a daunting task especially for those just starting out. When you add in the seriousness of making sure your website is ADA compliant, it can become downright overwhelming.
Here are some resources that can help:
- (2020) WebFX. What is ADA Compliance? Available at https://www.webfx.com/blog/marketing/what-is-ada-compliance/ accessed on 30 May 2022.
- (2022) Inc.com. 7 Ways to Make Sure Your Website is ADA Compliant. Available at https://www.inc.com/carol-sankar/7-ways-to-make-sure-your-website-is-ada-compliant.html accessed on 2 June 2022.
- (2022) ADA Compliance Pros. Is ADA Compliancy Mandatory for Websites in 2022. Available at https://adacompliancepros.com/is-ada-compliance-mandatory-for-websites-in-2022/ accessed on 4 June 2022.
