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Today nearly all websites, by law, must comply with current web accessibility standards and requirements for ADA compliance. Ignoring these requirements puts your website at risk of lawsuits, brand tarnish, and missed opportunities.
Although the The Americans With Disabilities Act was established before the Internet, its designers intentionally designed it to evolve. The notion of “places of public accommodation” is a core element of the law and a perfect example of its flexibility. As technology has evolved, today we find that websites and mobile apps are essential places to shop, learn, share, and connect, and thus protected by the ADA.
Website accessibility standards break down to four basic principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust. The following overview includes limited examples for the sake of providing an “overview”. Refer to the WCAG 2.1 for more details.
Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive. This means that users must be able to perceive the information being presented (it can’t be invisible to all of their senses).
User interface components and navigation must be operable. This means that users must be able to operate the interface (the interface cannot require interaction that a user cannot perform)
Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable. This means that users must be able to understand the information as well as the operation of the user interface (the content or operation cannot be beyond their understanding)
Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. This means that users must be able to access the content as technologies advance (as technologies and user agents evolve, the content should remain accessible)
Our Seizure Safe Mode enables epileptic and seizure prone users to browse safely by eliminating the risk of seizures that result from flashing or blinking animations and color combinations that are known to trigger seizures.
Our Vision Impaired Mode enhances website visuals. Users can also increase font sizes, transform hard to read fonts into a more readable font, highlight text that is hard to see, or use the text magnifier to enlarge specific copy.
Our ADHD Friendly Mode helps users focus better and take away distractions.
Our Cognitive Disability Mode provides various features to help users to focus on the essential elements of your website more easily.
Our Keyboard Navigation Mode enables motor-impaired users to operate your website using a keyboard instead of a mouse.
Our Blind Users Mode adjusts your website to be compatible with screen-reader software such as JAWS, NVDA, Voiceover, and TalkBack. Screen-readers are software that blind people use on their computers and smartphones to read out messages and read content on websites.
Our Color Adjustment Panel allows users to change the color of elements and text on your website, change the contrast, and saturation.
Our Orientation Adjustment Panel allows users to get rid of all the distractions. You can mute sounds, hide images, stop animations, make their cursor enormous, and much more!
Our country is a beautiful melting pot of people from all over the world, and English isn’t always their first language. Our plugin lets users select their preferred language from an assortment of 20 options and automatically translates all the content on your website for them.
Making websites accessible is not just the right thing to do, it’s also a compliance matter. Now with a no-brainer straightforward solution, there’s no reason to postpone incorporating web accessibility in your Website.
Now that all government, nonprofit, and commercial websites have been deemed “places of public accommodation” in a court of law, they are now required to comply with the ADA guidelines. This legal development has spurred the growth of a new legal cottage industry that has used the court system to hold website owners accountable. While some of these legal actions have come from legitimate plaintiffs, most have come from serial plaintiffs and law firms to extort easy settlements that never reach the courts. Such copy and paste demand letters and lawsuits alleging websites violate the ADA have flooded the US – particularly in New York, California, and Florida.
Websites need to be accessible, but that shouldn’t mean you have to scrap your website and build a new one from scratch. Instead of allocating resources and doing it yourself, the AI does most of the work automatically for you to not only make your site more accessible and compliant, but also maintain them that way.
DEI includes the rights of people with disabilities to digital inclusion. Nothing has highlighted the value of digital access and the disparity of access better than the pandemic, when the world turned inward to the Web for nearly everything.
1 out of 5 people live with some kind of disability, being accessible means you:
People with disabilities are the most loyal customers, when they find an accessible website they will come back and also tell their friends and family.
People with disabilities will bounce out quickly from non-accessible websites affecting your dwell time and SEO score. Adding accessibility features to a website improves the user experience for those who need them.
Not only are there 61M people with a disability in the US, but also consider the 71M boomers who carry $548B in discretionary spending and who also share similar challenges with vision, hearing, cognition and fine motor skills.
In a study by the AmeriCorps, people over 40 made up the majority of nonprofit volunteers nationwide and had the best volunteer retention rates compared to younger generations.
According to a BlackBaud study on Individual Donors in the US, the average age of donors is 65. Since 2016, the average donor age has increased from 62 to 65. This is an indication that the mature donor cohort has demonstrated their reliability when it comes to giving back.
Making your website accessible to older people with disabilities could potentially help your nonprofit tap into a larger audience of potential donors.
Pretty cool, right?
If you have a WordPress website,
you can have this feature added
to your website in a matter of days!
Making your website accessible is much easier and more affordable than you might think!
Set up a free consultation with our Director today to learn more about making your website ADA compliant!