Commercial websites are typically designed to appeal to the most massive audience possible, making it essential that they be accessible to people with disabilities.

While there are tens of millions of Americans with disabilities, World Bank estimates that there are nearly a billion people on Earth living with a disability.

Website accessibility checkers can help you reach this audience by showing where your site falls short when it comes to accessibility and what steps you need to take to remedy those flaws. 

Broadly speaking, there are three main ways a website accessibility checker can help improve your site’s performance:

• Increase traffic
• Reduce the risk of lawsuits due to claims your site is inaccessible to those with disabilities
• Boost sales

Before we explore how website accessibility checkers can enable your site to benefit in these ways, we’ll take a look at what exactly is meant by “website accessibility.”

What Does Website Accessibility Mean?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 mandates that websites be accessible for all users, including those with disabilities. A website is said to be accessible when it is designed so that it can easily be used by people with disabilities. This means that they can perceive, understand and navigate a website and interact with the site where appropriate. A wide variety of disabilities are covered under the umbrella of accessibility, including:

• Auditory
• Cognitive
• Neurological
• Physical
• Speech
• Visual

Making your website accessible can provide benefits to users without disabilities, both through situational applications and by improving overall website design. Situational impediments to website accessibility include:

• Individuals, often located in rural areas, who don’t have access to fast internet service or have limited bandwidth
• Individuals experiencing temporary disabilities due to an accident or injury of some sort
• Individuals using the web in areas where there is bright sunlight, loud noise or other impediments
• Individuals using smart phones, watches or other devices with limited screen space

Website accessibility encompasses a variety of tools used to help people with disabilities, including screen readers, alternate keyboard input devices, web browsers and specialized hardware. For instance, a blind person can use screen reader software to obtain an audio description of a website’s contents, or an individual without full use of their hands might use a keyboard or voice reader instead of a mouse.

Website accessibility checkers help commercial websites determine whether they are in compliance with the primary guidelines established to enable accessible website design; these are known as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1). They are compiled by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative.

By following these guidelines, businesses can ensure that their site is in compliance with the technical requirements specified in WCAG.

Increase Traffic

By using a website accessibility checker to make sure that your website is easy for people with disabilities to use, you can substantially boost the number of visitors able to effectively navigate your site – encouraging them to become repeat visitors and to recommend your site to their friends.

The increased traffic a website accessibility tracker can help generate does not strictly stem from accommodating people with disabilities. Following the WCAG guidelines helps improve its appeal to web surfers of all types.

A well-designed website is like a beautifully constructed house or restaurant with inviting ambience – it draws people to it and makes them want to extend their stay when they get there.

The WCAG 2.1 guidelines encompass the following design principles:

• Improve site readability
• Enable intuitive navigation
• Promote a clutter-free layout

Comply with the Law

Federal law, in the form of the ADA, says that businesses that are open to the public must make reasonable efforts to ensure that their facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. Over time, this law has been interpreted to apply to public websites as well as to physical facilities. To comply with the law, adhering to WCAG 2.1 standards is generally accepted to be sufficient to establish compliance with the ADA.

Websites that don’t comply with the law run the risk of lawsuits. The cost of defending against such suits, even if you win, can be of magnitude that exceeds the cost of updating the site.

In recent years, lawsuits against companies such as Five Guys Enterprises, Hobby Lobby Stores and Winn-Dixie Stores alleging that these firms’ websites were not accessible to people with disabilities have resulted in rulings supporting the plaintiffs’ claims. 

To avoid facing the potential expense and bad publicity associated with accessibility lawsuits, a highly cost-effective step is to employ a website accessibility checker to evaluate the accessibility of your site to people with disabilities.

Boost Sales

Because a website that is designed for accessibility improves the user experience as a whole, benefiting all users, not just those with disabilities, accessibility can help boost sales by increasing the attractiveness of your brand and website to its users.

While increasing traffic to your website is an important objective, the ultimate goal is to increase sales on your site. The sales process can encompass a variety of steps, whether direct purchases of your products or services or using the process of conversions – where visitors to your site perform actions such as signing up for your email list or requesting more information on a product before a sale is made. To optimize the process, user-friendly design is crucial to converting visitors to your site into customers.

By complying with WCAG guidelines, you can design your site in a manner that enables efficient navigation from page to page and within a page.

This includes making it as easy as possible for your visitors to access functionality linked to the buying or conversion process. It’s important to note that inaccessibilities in transactional mechanisms often make the most negative impact – imagine trying to cross a bridge where a large gap is missing in the first few steps.

You can use a website accessibility checker to verify that your website is using design principles that make it possible for people with disabilities, and people in general, to easily access all the functionality on your site. Beautiful images are one thing, but unless your website combines aesthetics with efficacy, you are likely to find that your sales are limited by its design.

By using a website accessibility checker to make sure your site is properly designed to be accessible to those with disabilities, you can boost your site’s ability to make sales by increasing the site’s appeal to people with disabilities and everyone else, given the user-friendly principles incorporated in the WCAG guidelines.

Start Your Website Compliance Check

Not sure how to make your website ADA compliant?

The provisions of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) require that places of public accommodation, including websites, make themselves accessible to people with disabilities. Yet ADA website compliance is not only good policy from a legal standpoint; it also makes sense financially. This article covers 4 ways an ADA website compliance service can help drive significant savings for your business in the long run.

These include:

• Reducing legal fees by helping your site avoid accessibility lawsuits
• Saving on marketing costs by enabling your site to appeal to a broader audience
• Improving site design, boosting user loyalty and engagement and cutting marketing costs
• Saving on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) spending by bolstering your SEO efforts

Reduce Legal Costs

Lawsuits brought against websites that aren’t accessible to people with disabilities have been on the upswing lately. Since the landmark lawsuit brought against Winn-Dixie by a blind man who claimed that the company’s website was in violation of the ADA, many more lawsuits have followed.

In excess of 2,000 lawsuits against websites for ADA compliance issues were reportedly filled in 2018, substantially more than the prior year. To complicate matters further for website owners, even gaining dismissal of an accessibility lawsuit against a site doesn’t remedy the tens of thousands in legal fees that achieving a dismissal might cost.

Using an ADA website compliance service to bring your site into compliance with the ADA can pay big dividends over the long-term by sharply reducing the likelihood that you will be sued for having a non-accessible site. 

Save on Marketing Costs by Broadening Your Site’s Appeal

Failing to make your site accessible to people with disabilities can reduce your ability to do business with a customer group estimated to be more than 50 million strong in the U.S., according to the United States Census Bureau.

By hiring a website accessibility service, you can rapidly broaden the scope of your site’s addressable audience – an audience that holds billions in spending power.

The costs to reach such a huge audience using traditional marketing methods, whether through digital or analog methods, would be substantial, especially on an ongoing basis.

Using an ADA website compliance service, however, can generate substantial savings by drastically increasing the size of your potential customer base.

Improve Site Design, Boosting User Loyalty and Engagement and Cutting Marketing Costs

The WCAG 2.0 guidelines, the standards most commonly utilized to guide accessible website design, are widely considered to be effective for improving overall website usability and design.

These guidelines can do more than simply make your site accessible to people with disabilities.

Because they are based on principles of good design, they can also make your site appealing and easy to navigate for all of your visitors. This means that business you might have otherwise lost due to poor site design or functionality can now be retained.

This improved site design can save you significant sums that you would otherwise spend on marketing for visits and engagement on your website. Over time – from an efficiency standpoint – the savings from improving your site’s design are substantial.

Save on SEO Costs by Bolstering Your SEO Efforts

SEO bots from Google and other search engines have been said to search websites by crawling through them similarly to the manner in which a person with disabilities would. As a result, the changes necessary to make your website compliant with the ADA can also make it easier for search engine bots to evaluate your site for SEO purposes.

A search engine bot can’t view your pictures, So, like an individual with visual disabilities, it relies on your alt tags describing the image. A search engine also can’t listen to the audio associated with video content on your site, so it also relies on written descriptions or transcripts of the material – similar to those with disabilities.

Major search engines such as Google have made it clear that user-friendliness and intuitive site navigation play a part in determining a site’s position in the SERPs (search engine results page) – the position your page will get after a search offers it up as a result.

Boosting your SEO in this manner can generate significant savings over the long run in funds that you would otherwise spend on SEO efforts.

Start Your Website Compliance Check

Not sure how to make your website ADA compliant? Download our Essential Web Accessibility Guide to walk through what makes a website compliant and learn how yours stacks up.

Healthcare providers, both private and public, are required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to offer equal access to healthcare services and facilities, including websites and other digital information. To ensure that you are complying with the provisions of the act, ADA compliance testing is, to say the least, “recommended.”

With healthcare costs for people with disabilities reported to comprise 26.7% of all healthcare costs in the country, totaling approximately $400 billion per year, doing so makes sense from both a business and regulatory standpoint—And not doing so clearly impacts an enormous portion of patients who need healthcare services.

Given that not all websites have taken the steps necessary to make them accessible to people with disabilities, making their website ADA compliant offers healthcare providers the opportunity to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Barriers to Access

There has been significant publicity, in recent years, relating to the need to comply with Title III of the ADA, which states that places offering public accommodation must remove “access barriers” that would prevent a person with disabilities from accessing an organization’s services or products.

What constitutes a barrier to access?

One example would be if an individual who is blind is unable to use screen-reading technology because a website hasn’t been designed to accommodate such software. Another would be if a person with a hearing disorder had to watch an instructional video with no closed captioning provided.

Those don’t seem like user-friendly experiences, do they?

Similarly, a patient with manual dexterity challenges is likely to become frustrated using a website that doesn’t accommodate assistive technology.

Enhancing the Patient Experience with ADA Compliance Testing

If your website has barriers that prevent people with disabilities from easily accessing it, performing ADA compliance testing can help improve the patient experience. Following are four ways in which ADA compliance testing to make sure a website is compliant with WCAG 2.0 (Website Content Accessibility Guidelines):

• Making sure your website can be navigated solely by keyboard. People whose physical disabilities prevent them from using a mouse will find your website difficult to use unless you have tested it to ensure that users can access all functionality (browsing, purchasing, accessing links, etc.) with just the keyboard.  
• Selecting a proper contrast ratio between your site’s text and its background. Patients with visual impairments can find it difficult to make out the text on your site if you haven’t tested the contrast ratio to ensure it meets minimum visibility standards.
• Testing your website’s text-scaling capability. To ensure maximum accessibility for readers, test your website to verify that it can process text scaling to as high as 200% without this causing horizontal scrolling or other layout problems that make it hard to read your site’s content.
• Verify that your site works with screen reader software. This type of software converts the text on your website into a form (such as text-to-speech) that can be understood by people with visual impairments. Testing your site to make sure that it can accommodate such software is crucial to staying in compliance with the ADA’s accessibility requirements.

Testing all of the above aspects of your website’s functionality enables you to make improvements where necessary, so it is easier for people with disabilities to use your site. This, in turn, can significantly improve the patient experience for those users.

Benefits of Improving the Patient Experience for People with Disabilities

There are a number of benefits you can derive from testing your site to make sure it is accessible to people with disabilities. These include:

• Reduce any potential legal liability: There have been a number of instances of patients or patient groups suing healthcare providers who failed to comply with the ADA. By testing your site to ensure that it is in compliance with the ADA, you can reduce the likelihood of being sued for noncompliance.  
• Boost your potential customer base: There are over 50 million people in the U.S. with disabilities, according to the United States Census Bureau. By making sure your website is easy for them to use, you instantly increase the number of patients you can serve.
• Improve patient loyalty: Patients with disabilities who already work with your organization are likely to
  appreciate your efforts to make sure they can easily access information related to their care online. Doing so can enhance patient loyalty, helping you keep patients happy (and less likely to look elsewhere to meet their healthcare needs).
• Enhance search engine optimization (SEO) efforts: When patients search for your category of healthcare, the higher
  your organization’s name is on the list, the more likely it is that web searchers will contact you.

Search engines gauge a site’s accessibility to users, among other factors, when determining how high a site rates in their rankings. By taking the necessary steps to make your website easily accessible by people with disabilities, you can also boost your site’s ranking with the search engines, helping you attract more business.

Start Your Website Compliance Check

Not sure if your website’s compliant with ADA? User1st takes the first step towards compliance for you by analyzing your website to identify accessibility issues. Find out how accessible your website is today.

What You Need to Know to Protect Your Business

After years of court battles, the legal precedent has been set. Companies and organizations can be penalized if individuals with disabilities cannot access their online content.

As the Internet becomes an ever-growing part of our everyday lives, numerous pieces of Federal and State legislation are now focusing on web accessibility. To avoid costly fines, businesses need to start incorporating web accessibility into their website design and development cycle. In addition to protecting themselves from litigation, doing so will also help them attract and retain customers with disabilities as well as build goodwill with the public at large.

What are Common Reasons for Web Accessibility Complaints?

Causes for web accessibility complaints are wide-ranging and in many cases depend on a particular person’s disability. Although no business can account for all forms of disability, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the Internet, has published a set of guidelines to help make online content accessible to individuals with disabilities, called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG 2.0, the second iteration of the guidelines, focuses on four principles that are necessary for web content to be considered accessible:

• Perceivability: Information and user interface components must be presentable to users with disabilities in ways they can understand it; content needs to be transformable from one format (e.g., sight, sound) into another (e.g., alternative text). Form fields also must have labels so screen readers can read them to users. Headings, link groups, and paragraphs must be structured appropriately so screen reader users can identify and navigate to them easily.
• Operability: User interface components and navigation must be usable through various input methods (e.g., using a mouse, keyboard, voice input)
• Understandability: Information and the operation of user interface must be comprehensible. This includes writing content in plain language, explaining jargon and acronyms, and intuitive and consistent navigation
• Robustness: Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents—including assistive technologies—and across operating systems, browsers and mobile devices

While there are certainly unique cases and circumstances that require further accommodations, following these guidelines will not only address the majority of potential complaints and ensure consumption by users with disabilities but also protect a business from legal liability.

How to Address Web Accessibility Complaints

Receiving a web accessibility complaint does not inherently mean a loss of customers. Handled properly, responding to a complaint can show your customers and users that you care about their concerns and can even help them build a stronger relationship with your brand. Here are some steps to turn a web accessibility into a positive situation.

• Quick Response

Responding quickly to a complaint and acknowledging the existence of a problem is always the best course of action. Addressing the specifics of the complaint may take some time, but all organizations must make clear that they are working swiftly to address the concern.

• Assessing the Issue

The organization must then review the complaint to see whether it is an isolated occurrence, such as an outside glitch, or whether it is a perpetual issue.

• Planning a Course of Action

If the issue is perpetual (ex: a webpage whose content cannot be read by a screen reader), a plan to remedy the issue must be devised. In many cases, this involves restructuring a web page or recoding the site, which may require the expertise of an accessibility specialist.

• Correcting the Issue and Reviewing

Once a plan is set in motion, the actual remediation must occur. This is followed by a review and test phase to ensure that the complaint has been resolved. This normally involves end users testing the site, and it may include the initial person who filed the issue to ensure that their complaint has been addressed to their satisfaction.

How to Avoid Future Web Accessibility Complaints

Ensuring that your web pages are accessible to individuals with disabilities seems like a daunting task; it requires a significant monetary and time commitment that may not be seen as worth the effort. This approach is misguided as the costs associated with being inaccessible can have far greater consequences than the costs required to achieve accessibility in the first place. Besides the legal fines, not having accessible content also means missing out on a significant number of potential customers.

The best way to avoid future web accessibility complaints is to make it a top priority during the development phase. Finding out how to incorporate web accessibility early on can save time and money down the road. Likewise, continuous monitoring of your site’s compliance with the WCAG will ensure that your site is shielded against legal action.

Nevertheless, the reality is that the sheer volume of content and information an organization produces on a daily basis makes achieving (and maintaining) web accessibility a challenge. New web accessibility techniques exist today that automatically update web pages to WCAG standards and offer continuous monitoring to ensure your web pages are always accessible.

The future of web accessibility is in automation. Automated systems provide both a cost- and a time-effective solution to web accessibility. Automation reduces cost by not requiring a dedicated web accessibility specialist and reduces time to achieve compliance by not requiring manual recoding. Likewise, it increases overall company efficiency by keeping your development efforts focused on your business rather than on web accessibility compliance.