ADA Compliance
Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is being interpreted to include websites as “places of public accommodation.”
Websites that have substantial inaccessible features can be seen as discriminatory against people with disabilities, and is in violation of the Title III of the ADA. After all, the ADA is a strict liability law.
2021 is probably the time to make your website accessible to people with disabilities including: blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these.
The next 5 minute article just might save you $10,000.
If you are here trying to figure out what exactly ADA compliance is, and which websites have to abide by this extensive, tiresome, dull set of guidelines you have come to the right place.
We will save you the pain of the 47 page Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and touch on the most important factors to become ADA Compliant with your company’s website.
Lawsuits against companies with websites that do not meet ADA guidelines are on the rise in the United States.
The Real Estate industry seems to be in the forefront of the push to comply with ADA, with the Fair Housing Act and other anti-discrimination laws being used to sue website owners and target industries that service the public in any way. This leaves little and if any websites in the clear.
Scam Central, the fifty dollar widget.
Automated accessibility/compliance scams come in the form of plugins, widgets, and other toolbars. Simply installing a plugin on your website to read your screen, make text bigger, change the color to black and white, and other related tasks maybe takes care of 1/10 of your compliance guidelines. The WCAG 2.0 guidelines are far more extensive than what a widget can perform, and the only real way to become compliant is to manually revise the website one guideline at a time.
Scam Central, the automated ADA checker.
Some agencies are charging a few thousand dollars for an “automated scan” of your website. Let’s talk about this again, with variances in framework in websites, there is no automated scan that can be performed. Websites must be audited manually by a developer, a tedious process.
So, how do you make your website accessible to everyone?
It’s “simple.” Follow the steps to the WCAG 2.0 guide.
