ADA compliance is about making it more accessible to everyone. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) seeks to ensure that people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. When it comes to your website, ADA compliance means creating opportunities by making your website more accessible.
This can be very important, as without an accessible website, potential customers won’t be able to access and use your website reasonably. Issues such as poor contrast, lack of responsiveness and versatility across devices, and a difficult-to-navigate website can hinder your website’s accessibility.
Accessibility to consider when building your website:
Ways to help: ensure your site has high visual contrast, use easy-to-read fonts and text sizes, provide audio/text-to-speech, and utilize an uncomplicated site structure.
- Visual difficulties make it difficult to see the content on the page.
- Includes blindness, blurry vision, and color blindness, as well as photosensitive conditions.
- Ways to help: ensure your site has high visual contrast, avoid flashing videos/graphics, provide audio/text-to-speech, use easy-to-read fonts and text sizes, provide alternative text for images, and provide alternate navigation methods.
- Hindered or limited mobility makes it difficult to navigate a webpage with a mouse.
- Includes difficulties with muscle control, arthritis, or other functional movement disorders.
- Ways to help: provide alternate navigation methods.
- Audio difficulties make it difficult to hear and process sound.
- Includes hearing loss, auditory processing disorders, sound sensitivity, and more.
- Ways to help: provide accurate transcripts and/or captions with any audio or video.
- Cognitive and mental processing/disorders make digesting information harder.
- Includes dyslexia, traumatic brain injury, and a variety of other processing/cognitive disorders (this has a very wide spectrum).
- Ways to help: ensure your site has high visual contrast, use easy-to-read fonts and text sizes, provide audio/text-to-speech, and utilize an uncomplicated site structure.
Building with WCAG. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, are a universal guide for making your website reasonably accessible. These guidelines check off four very important pillars to making a website ADA-compliant by asking if a website is:
- Perceivable: Users can identify and interact with your website and its content.
- Operable: Users can operate your website’s navigation, controls, links, and buttons.
- Understandable: Users can understand your website’s content and navigation.
- Robust: Users can interact with your website across multiple devices and assistive technologies.
It is also important to regularly test your website to ensure it meets the standards outlined in the WCAG. The internet is constantly changing, and it isn’t unusual for bigger teams to have multiple people adding content to a website. Be consistently on the lookout for shifts in ADA compliance and reasonably regulate what is added to your website to help ensure accessibility.
*NOTE: A new rule was passed in April 2024 regarding the accessibility of web content provided by state and local governments. This new rule states that web content provided by state and local governments MUST meet WCAG 2.1 AA. Recently, a one-year extension was given, and the new deadlines are as follows:
- For public entities/special district governments with a population of less than 50,000: April 26, 2028
- For state and local government entities with a population of over 50,000: April 26, 2027
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Have a wonderful 4th of July from all of us at Poole Communications!
Is the deadline for ADA compliance encroaching? We can help make your website digitally accessible.
Give us a call: 573-221-3635… or send us an email at info@poolecommunications.com.
