Is My Website ADA Compliant? How to Check Your Site

ADA lawsuits are on the rise and expanding at a record breaking pace. The rising number of accessibility lawsuits puts emphasis on the need for ADA compliance audits. These audits involve a series of thorough inspections to make your website ADA compliant. The biggest brands like Amazon, Dominos and Nike have faced legal repercussions for violating the ADA titles and have been forced to pay steep fines. If you are now stressing out about the expensive lawsuits and ways to prevent them, then ADA testing tools and audits will soon become your best friends. To expedite your learning curve, we have compiled all of the useful information for those who are wondering how to check a website for ADA compliance:

What does it mean to have an ADA compliant website?

ADA is a civil rights law that mandates the development of website and technology design while keeping the challenges of disabled users in mind. The law ensures that your business website is easily accessible to everyone. Those who have vision impairments should be able to access the content available on your website with the help of screen readers. Users with cognitive impairments should be able to fill out the forms and navigate the information with ease. The color contrast, videos, images and every other element of your website should be easy to operate.

The government shares some useful standards and suggestions to develop an accessible website. In simple terms, if you want an ADA compliant website, you need to follow the guidelines. The most popular benchmarks are discussed in the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). Besides, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act also provides a useful framework to make your technology product easily accessible.

Referring to these technical guidelines is helpful for preventing you from the risk of expensive lawsuits. When your website codes are developed using the suggested frameworks, the products are easily accessible by disabled users. This indeed is beneficial to increase the size of your target audience. When the number of potential users is increased, you get more chances of converting the leads and maximizing the profitability.

What are your options to check ADA compliance?

ADA website compliance test is the best practice to steer clear of the risk of litigations. There are two ways to achieve the desired levels of compliance:

• Free website ADA compliance checker tools: Accessibility problems related to color contrast and broken links can be identified easily using a free tool. A long list of evaluation tools can be found online. There are dedicated tools for specific compliance issues, you can use any of these and quickly verify the problem areas.
• Specialized ADA compliance manual audits: Software scans are not always accurate. The results are quick but not reliable, running at only a 30% accuracy rate. For comprehensive testing and definitive findings, one must turn to manual audits. The basic level of compliance that you achieve from automated testing is not enough to protect you against ADA lawsuits. The best practice is to seek out comprehensive manual audits and remediations. Audit specialists can thoroughly check every page of your website and address the issues that are missed out during automated scans.

Bottom line

WCAG guidelines are quite exhaustive. To evaluate each set of code on your website based on the WCAG checklist, you can combine software testing with manual audits. To check your website with a free Ada Compliant Website Test visit the link given below.