Have you ever thought about how people with disabilities like visual impairment, epilepsy, or ADHD view your website? If not, you should. According to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title III , every business has to provide equal access to their services to people with disabilities. If your website is not ADA compliant, you are at risk of being sued and facing unnecessary legal expenses. No business wants their website to be difficult for someone to use. So, how do you make your website user friendly for everyone? Here are some steps you can follow.
Make sure people with disabilities can easily access your website
When you are building a site for a person with disabilities, there are a few important things to consider. First, make sure the content is accessible. That means using clear language so people with vision limitations can easily understand what you are saying and can rapidly navigate through pages. This is actually important for all users and is the number one problem with all business websites compliant or not.
Make your website responsive
Many websites look terrible for disabled users. This is largely because the layout software on most web hosting companies isn’t set up to provide a good experience for users with disabilities. Responsive design solves this problem by ensuring that all content fits within the screen bounds of any device browsing the web. When done correctly, it also reduces server load time — another benefit for users with disabilities. Server load time has become very important to Google and sites that load fast will be ranked higher in the search engine.
What is a responsive web design?
It’s a set of coding principles and practices that can be used by webmasters to give their sites greater flexibility when displaying content on different types of screens. If you’re building a business website for a disabled person, then this is an essential topic to understand. There are many steps involved in making a responsive website for people with disabilities, so making sure that you follow best practices and meet accessibility guidelines is important.
Provide alternative text for each image on the site
Many websites for disabled users include alternative text for images along with the image. This can be very helpful to visitors with visual disabilities and can help encourage repeat visits. Many users with disabilities use screen readers to navigate websites. Screen readers do not read what is in the image unless the website has alternative text for images. This can also help your website ranking in search engines like Google or Bing.
Provide high contrast in case of a low/no-contrast display
The use of contrast is important when it comes to the layout of your website for users with disabilities. This makes the content on your site much easier to read and follow. It also helps—for some people at least—to differentiate page sections on the site.
Use Artificial intelligence.
Making your website accessible is an ever-moving target. You need ongoing compliance and that can be expensive. We recommend using an AI technology that we can help you implement; which will save you time and money. Using AI, your website is re-scanned and re-analyzed every 24 hours to maintain compliance with changed regulations and any new pages or information that you may have added. The best part is, in most cases, we can do this for less than $500 per year vs the old way of doing this which was at least $5,000 per year. Your website is complaint withing 48 of us getting started.
Here are some of the things we do as part of this service:
- Accessibility statement & certification
- Compliance with ADA legislation
- Monthly accessibility compliance audits
- Automatic daily monitoring and scans
- Litigation support package
There are several technical ways to make your website more accessible to people with disabilities. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business owner or just someone who wants to make the internet more accessible, using artificial intelligence (AI) can help you increase traffic and conversions for people with disabilities. Check whether or not your site can be accessed by a disabled person by running a free report on our website.
If you don’t want to go through the process of making your website accessible alone, let us help you and get your website compliant within 48 hours contact us now.