A websites is the digital face of your business. While planning your online presence, it is crucial to build a website that adheres to the ADA compliance guidelines. To put it simply, it means that your website is accessible to everyone regardless of their disabilities.
Designing an accessible website offers endless benefits:
To summarize:website accessibility will improve your ROI and expands your reach for new business.
Now let’s get back to the question at hand: what are the steps that should be taken to make a website accessible?
With a few website maintenance steps, accessibility standards can be achieved easily; keep reading to find out how.
4 Steps To Make a Website Accessible
In case you are building a website from scratch, you can consider the options of accessible CMS, plugins and other development features. On the other hand, achieving the accessibility standards on an existing website involve the following steps:
Step 1:Understand accessibility:The first step toward achieving conformance is to understand the website accessibility ADA guidelines. To improve the accessibility standards, one can refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Also, for some businesses, especially ones that have contracts with the US Government, it is important to also conform the Section 508 guidelines. Knowing the significance of these guidelines is important to aim for the desired standard for accessibility. It’s a myth that adhering to all these standards is expensive and time consuming. You can get in touch with industry specialists to find the best and prioritized solutions that meet your business needs.
Step 2: Accessibility Testing:The next step is to pick a sophisticated suite of evaluation tools to check the websiteaccessibility and Ada Checker compliance. Quick software testing is done to check the universal design principles. Automated scans are useful to check accessibility issues related to color, contrast, navigation and links.
Step 3: Accessibility Audit:WCAG 2.0 and later versions are stringent in terms of accessibility testing. Therefore, relying on automated testing tools is not sufficient. To achieve ADA compliance, manual audits are the next important step to achieve sufficient accessibility. Based on your selected level of WCAG conformance – which really should not be below WCAG 2.1 AA – the auditors will check every element of the website. Human auditing ensures that your website isanalysed from everyone’s perspective and takes into consideration the human engagement element for every possible requirement. This includes people who have visual, auditory, cognitive and neurological disabilities.
Results achieved through automated web accessibility tools are only 30% accurate. For total conformance, automated testing must be combined with manual audits to fulfil every accessibility guideline.
Step 4:Achieve accessibility conformance:In the next step, the manual audit report is submitted to the client and then the recommended improvements can be made to make the website accessible. While seeking out a manual audit company, it is important to verify the accuracy and level of detail they include in their reports. Do they include mobile testing? What browsers and screen readers are included? Do they ensure they do live audits and are not just packaging automated website scan results. Not all reports are created equal. Ensuring you are getting a thorough one is crucial.
a
Final word
Following the accessibility principles contributessignificantly to the profitability of a business. To make websites ADA compliant, you can get in touch with accessibility experts. For more information on the process of testing and manual audits, visit the link given below.