5 Best Website ADA Compliance Practices to Ensure Equal Accessibility to All

The objective of The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines is to provide equal opportunity for physically limited individuals to access the same services, goods seamlessly through any website alike others without any hardship.

ADA focuses on fostering website owners with a defined set of rules, guidelines and best practices to ensure users with difficulties in hearing, accessing web information seamlessly.

Here are the 5 best practices for improving the web access of individuals with physical limitations.

ADA Violations for Websites Matter.

Many organizations presume that ADA standards are meant solely for the accommodations and transportations. On the contrary, the rules are formulated to meet the website standards as well: reason ‘ all users must access the information about services, products online without any difficulties.

5 Best Practices for Better Website Accessibility

Every customer should be offered access to information on any page in the form of images, PDFs, audio, video, etc., and failing to do so will violate the ADA guidelines which subsequently leads to legal scrutiny.

Let’s throw light on the 5 top accessibility parameters that need to be addressed by web owners instantly for minimizing penalty and reaching out more customers.

1. Web Images

As the adage goes ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’ it is critical for web owners to create images accessible by all visitors. Most often visitors with color blindness or poor visibility may try accessing the website, it is up to the web design and development team to focus on the robust techniques to create images that are accessible to everyone.

In fact, adding alternative text to non-text items is suggested and it is a best practice to match with the ADA compliance.

2. Font Size, Headers, Labels

For individuals with vision problems, accessing a web page text of smaller sizes will be a strenuous task and this could prevent them from accessing any specific information on the website. This violates level A, AA guidelines of ADA WCAG 2.0.

Directing them to the right section with legible fonts, readable font sizes with specific headers and labels will offer better accessibility to the users. This completely turns down the penalty issues.

3. Keyboard Control

Physically limited individuals will have difficulties in accessing the website using mouse alone. Enabling them with keyboard interface, without specific time limits for key strokes except for inputs, will ensure them a hassle-free access to the intended page.

Offering them with shortcuts and complete keyboard control will enhance the accessibility and satisfy the ADA guidelines.

4. Navigation and Menu Structure

A great deal of challenge awaiting users with physical limitations is web page navigations. Improper and poor navigation, unstructured menus can lead to chaos and these would make their lives miserable. This ADA violation could lead to substantial penalties and may even lawsuits.

Developing websites with ‘Skip to Navigations,’ ‘Streamlined Menus’ will ease their difficulties in accessing any specific page and empowers them with equal opportunity analogous with others.

5. Videos

Visitors with hearing complexity will face arduous tasks in accessing video content on web pages. This again can lead to severe penalty as the WCAG 2.0 guidelines are against this.

Providing the users with subtitles and captions for the videos is the best possible practice to improve the website accessibility.