Why is it Important to Check for ADA Compliance?
We all know physical locations must tailor to certain disabilities with braille elevators, wheelchair ramps, etc, but what about online “locations”? More and more companies are getting ADA lawsuit letters demanding websites be fully accessible to people who can’t see or hear as well as most. Beyond that you, as a business owner, should make your site, products and services available to as many potential customers as possible and you may be losing valuable business if your site isn’t in line with ADA compliance for website.
How to check if a website is ADA Compliant?
You have many options to check your website for ADA compliance. There are dozens of automated systems that will give you a good mid-level view of what’s potentially wrong with your site. As great as that is they don’t give you specifics on how to correct these issues. Additionally, there are dozens of ADA compliance checks that must be done manually by someone who fully understands the WCAG 2.0 requirements. They can be confusing and very difficult to parse out what exactly to look for and how to correct.
That’s Where We Come In
We can provide a free website ADA audit to let you know exactly what needs to be corrected. We can also provide in depth recommendations on how to fix areas of your site that wren’t ADA compliant.
ADA Compliant Website Checklist
There are four main areas of ADA compliance for websites and each had many sub sections. Generally it’s important to check for (high level ADA checklist):
- Alternative text for images, videos and other non-text elements
- Consistent navigation throughout your site
- When tabbing your site’s navigation and content follows a logical order.
- Allow users to skip the navigation elements when tabbing
- Ensure users on phones and tablets can zoom enough to see your content
- Use proper contrast between fore and backgrounds even when the user turns off images
There are many other ADA checks for your website but these high level items listed above are the most important for your visitors. We use a variety of ada website checkers that are available to everyone and combine all that data with our manual inspection to come up with a full view of your website’s ADA compliant status.
Dallas Website ADA Compliance Checker
There are several automated ADA compliance checker apps and programs available to the public. The only issues are 1. it’s typically difficult to understand what the issue and corrections are and 2. there are several manual issues to check for that an automated checker simply can’t audit. The automated checker is the best and easiest place to start. Then fix whatever you can based on that audit. However you’re not necessarily out of the woods yet – you need to recheck your ADA corrections at minimum and ideally have a trained Google SEO Consultant dallas and ADA professional review your site for the other key issues many sites have.
I Know My Website Is Not ADA Compliant. Now What?
Give us a call and let us perform a free ADA audit check of your site. It usually takes a couple days and will give you a good road map of what needs to be corrected. The initial check is usually enough to get the lawyers to back off and make your site generally usable to people with visual or hearing difficulties. After the initial audit we recommend a more in depth ADA check to find any underlying issues that come up after the first round of corrections.