Since January 2018, new regulations for ADA (The Americans with Disabilities Act) were set, to improve the accessibility of the web for such people.
Few points are listed below, to ensure that you have an ada compliant website design, though 100% guarantee cannot be assured.
- While developing contents, ensure best practices of web writing. The website content should be short and simple, which would enable the users to study the contents easily. This can be done by providing headings and sub headings. Wherever abbreviations are used, ensure to use period between each letter, for better pronunciation.
- Auditing website’s code. Developer has to review the code and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and has to ensure best techniques are been used. And also, the old codes need to be cleaned up.
- Reviewing WCAG (Website Content Accessibilities Guidelines) 2.0. They provide suggestions to make the website more accessible.
- Ensuring images have alt tags with descriptions. Alt tags provide descriptions against each image. This would help the user to understand the elements of the website.
- Using WAVE Web Accessibility Tool to audit the website. By using Google’s WAVE tool, the accessibility issues (like missing styles, alt tags etc) can be focussed upon.
- Reviewing website’s elements and styles like buttons, links or headlines. Any kind of users can access the website, including users with disabilities. So, if the website includes small and light fonts, hence it won’t be feasible for people with disabilities to navigate your website, which is a drawback for you.
As the new ADA rules would be effective soon, it is necessary to ensure that you have an ADA compliant web design. This is not to be implemented once, but is part of your on-going maintenance work for the website.
Use ADA Compliance Website Services to make an ADA compliant website with the following features:
Overlay Widgets:
In this case, the vendors insert certain codes and menu widget in the website design, which makes it easier for the disabled persons to navigate your website.
Law:
The law which controls the accessibility of website in US is ADA (The Americans with Disabilities Act).The most important point of ADA is: if the website is not accessible, then it is discriminating to users who have disability.
WCAG
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) are issued by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), under Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). W3C issues rules to ensure the website is uniform and runs better. If the same guidelines for accessibility are used, the website would be much better.
Lawsuit and Demand Letters
A small- scale industry has been formed throughout the digital accessibilities to forecast the future. Even if a user gets a demand letter and settles it, their website has to be accessible. If a user is sued once doesn’t mean he cannot be sued again by another company. ADA is a very strict law and there is no excuse for non compliance.
Accessibility Audits:
An audit is a traditional evaluation performed by any accessibility expert. The evaluation is done manually. Once completed, a report is sent to client listing all the accessibility issues.
Automatic Scans:
Website scans have the ability to point 20-25% of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.1. Scan can save time and reduce human errors while capturing certain accessibility issues.
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