You may own a business website for your products or services or a public information portal if you have heard of the accessibility compliance needs by now. It is important for you to fully care about your business and also to take care of who is coming to your website. To ensure compliance, you need to consider how your potential customers use your website. It is your duty to ensure the best experience for them. By considering those who are visiting you online, a portal needs to accommodate all their needs and ensure that everyone has accessibility to your website. This is the point where ADA or the American with Disabilities Acts come into the picture for ensuring universal web accessibility.
About ADA or the Americans with Disabilities Act – AccessiBe
ADA came into action almost three decades ago as a law passed by the Federal government. ADA was meant for honoring the special needs of all disabled individuals by avoiding any discrimination. AccessiBe explains that ADA as any employer, business, or government entity that serves the public should take the measures to prevent any discrimination based on disability. All these types of providers also need to ensure that their products and services should be accessible to all.
There are different titles and clauses under the ADA law, which all aim at prohibiting any sort of discrimination against disabled people. The coverage of this law is included but is not limited to the state government, local government, employers, public transportation, public utilities, telecommunication, and so on.
About web accessibility
Adopting the best ADA practices for e-commerce or business websites will improve the customer experience by ensuring accessibility. In this case, accessibility refers to addressing the special needs of individuals with disabilities who access the web. The needs of people differently-abled people may differ from case to case, from hearing or visual disabilities to cognitive and neurological deficits. They may not be able to read through the normal content of websites, listen to audio, or sometimes may not be able to use the input devices like mouse or keyboard properly.
Considering accessibility as a major consideration while developing websites will make it easier for individuals with disabilities to easily navigate through the website. Say, for example, managing the text, background colors, and contrast of a web page will make it easy for those who are color blind to understand the page content. In another case, it may be ideal for providing the audio transcript and video posts to help the hearing-impaired people understand the content.
Is it mandatory to have ADA compliance?
W3C Consortium also mandates accessibility compliance for websites to meet the global web development and design standards. Noncompliance with ADA is technically punishable by Federal law. The government websites which are non-compliant with ADA may enforce litigations. In many cases, we can see that the accessibility lawsuits are growing in numbers by targeting different government agencies and business giants like Amazon.
So, we can see that website accessibility and ADA compliance needs have tripled over the last few years and if you are website is not ADA compliant, it is high time that you need to do an audit and make it compliant. AccessiBe says that by being non-compliant, you are neglecting a considerable percentage of your potential customers and losing your business.