Eleviant is to Elevate & Scale. Eleviant Tech symbolizes business transformation and reinforces our mission to help clients elevate and scale their business.
Is your website ADA compliant? If not, it’s time to be!
Reports from different sources reveal demand letters and lawsuits against the financial, educational and restaurant websites violating The Americans with Disabilities Act are on the rise and the scenario may further worsen in the upcoming months. ‘
Disabled plaintiffs along with law firms are filing lawsuits against websites failing to provide equal access to people with disabilities. If your website doesn’t adhere to WCAG 2.0 level A, AA, AAA standard guidelines, then you may either face a lawsuit or penalty in terms of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So, it is a must to develop an ADA compliant website that offers equal access to products/services to every customer, including the physically challenged ones.
Before getting started with, it is imperative to understand what ADA is and why ADA compliance is critical.
Understanding ADA guidelines and its importance.
ADA, expanded as The Americans with Disabilities Act, is exclusively developed for customers that have physical limitations. The objective is to ensure equal accessibility of products/services to them like others, and it is for a good cause.
Even before you plan to develop a new website for your customers in the USA, it is a must to realize the paramount importance of ADA WCAG 2.0 guidelines. If you’ve got an existing website that violates the ADA rules, it’s time to revamp your website for enabling equal access to all.
There are different levels (A, AA, AAA) for measuring ADA non-compliance parameters.
Some of the simple guidelines include:
- Providing text alternatives for images
- Including captions, subtitles for videos
- Rendering complete keyboard control to access web pages
- Seamless navigation with relevant directions to switch between pages etc.
I have just named a few. Here is the comprehensive list of ADA guidelines for web compliance.
Developing/having a website aligning with ADA guidelines is a must to avoid hefty penalties and lawsuits. The settlements for inaccessible pages of your website can cost your business a fine of hundreds of thousands of dollars and this could hit your business bottom-line badly. So, ensure that your website is ADA compliant.
Don’t know how to get started? I will brief you on developing a website that is out-and-out ADA compliant.
1. Develop it right from the scratch/modify your website for equal accessibility
Even before you start developing your website, have a discussion with your development team and ensure that all the WCAG 2.0 guidelines for ADA violations are met. Seasoned developers realize this and will provide you with recommendations for developing a website that will help your business avoid the risk of penalties or lawsuit.
If you have got your website already up, audit the site for non-compliance to ensure the respective violations are fixed to avoid hefty fines and penalties.
2. Post-development/modification audit every feature.
There might be surplus changes and a flurry of new features to be added to a website for meeting customer demands. Nevertheless, it is quintessence to audit the new features included to ensure they in compliance with ADA rules. Even an incompatible screen reader software can make your website liable for litigation risk. Ensure you leave no stones unturned.
3. Find a right ADA compliance service.
Well, if yours is a small or mid-sized business, your in-house team would be pre-occupied with too many tasks and it would be difficult for them to audit and perform the ADA changes frequently. It requires expertise approach and dedicated team to run a thorough audit on your website and identify the non-compliance issues to provide you with insights on eliminating them.
An expert ADA service provider can help you with:
- The complete analysis of your website for ADA compliance
- Get you the list of violations based on the severity
- Chalk out a plan for making your site compliant with ADA rules immediately
- Fix the issues quickly and enhance the web performance for improved traffic, ROI
Hire our seasoned ADA experts to ensure your website is completely free of ADA litigation risk.
Get started with testing your website for ADA compliance now.
