Navigating the world of ADA compliance can feel like a daunting challenge, but creating an ADA compliant website doesn't have to be a herculean task. By ensuring your website is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, you're not only opening up your content to a wider audience but also protecting your business from potential legal troubles.
In this post, we'll discuss the essentials of ADA compliance for websites and provide you with a practical checklist to help you on your journey to a more accessible online presence. Whether you're a web designer, developer, or a business owner, understanding the ins and outs of ADA compliance is vital for ensuring that your website is welcoming and accessible to everyone.
Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal by Domino’s Pizza in a lawsuit brought against the franchise due to its website and mobile app not being compatible with screen-reader software used by visually-impaired customers.
The decision upholds a previous ruling that stated that the pizza franchise--and other retailers and consumer brands--must make online services, websites, mobile apps, and other digital products accessible in accordance with the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards or risk significant fines.
When it comes to digital accessibility, the federal and state courts are not messing around. According to research by law firm Seyfarth Shaw, federal lawsuits related to accessibility have risen 12% in the first six months of 2019 alone and grown consistently year-after-year since 2014.
Source: Seyforth - Federal Ada Title Iii Lawsuit Numbers Continue To Climb In 2019. https://www.adatitleiii.com/2019/07/federal-ada-title-iii-lawsuit-numbers-continue-to-climb-in-2019/
The Domino’s case is just one example of how brands are realizing the limitations that their customers with disabilities face when it comes to modern digital accommodations: Popular internet beauty brand Glossier also came under fire for not including alt-text on its site HTML, which prohibited visually-impaired users from identifying product details, prices, and more. Streaming service Hulu recently announced that it has improved its text compatibility with screen readers and created an audio description hub for its content.
It’s clear that digital marketing compliance is no longer just a concern for regulation-heavy industries like financial services and healthcare organizations. Marketing, design, and digital product teams for brands need to approach development with accessibility in mind, especially those in e-commerce, retail, and other transaction-heavy industries.
If you provide a website for your consumers (basically, everyone), or if you’re a design/digital agency that develops or maintains web properties for clients, it’s time to start thinking about how to make your web properties more digitally accessible to all visitors--and how to do it cost-effectively.
One of the challenges with investing in website revisions for accessibility is that, while there have been plenty of cases brought against organizations with accessibility issues, the Department of Justice has not provided federal standards for developing and maintaining ADA-compliant websites.
The ADA, which was put into law over 30 years ago, doesn’t include clear guidelines for modern digital accessibility. Title III of the ADA states that private and public entities cannot discriminate against customers based on disabilities while providing places of public accommodation--including their websites and mobile apps.
Digital accessibility boils down to one core concept: The sequencing of information on a website shouldn’t depend solely on the sensory elements that convey that information. That means that the shape, color, size, visual location, orientation, or sound of web elements should not prevent any user from understanding the information on a website or exclude them interacting with its properties. In short, the information and interface on any website hosted by private and public brands need to be just as usable by visitors with disabilities as those without.
Brands can take cues from The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which sets international standards for Internet hosting and usage and has been used as a common reference point in the absence of DOJ regulations. WCAG guidelines for accessibility include:
For example, if the background of your website is all high-resolution product videos with very little text, you’d need to provide an alternative way for someone who is vision- or hearing-impaired to consume the information contained in those videos.
With all of these potential changes, web development, digital marketing and IT teams that own multimedia-heavy web components can be looking at seriously time-consuming and costly projects to get their websites, mobile apps, and interfaces compatible for ADA accessibility.
It’s tempting to focus on the specific changes that need to be made to improve accessibility. The way you manage the internal/external review process for web design and development is also just as important. In order to minimize the cost of changing your website and any downtime to your site, you’ll want to identify and implement accessibility standards as efficiently as possible.
Now, consider the typical methodology used to manage the web development process. It’s a resource-intensive project with multiple moving parts, opinions, and versions:
The budget for this kind of web development process adds up quickly. It’s not just the development and design costs that--it’s the time cost of managing the review process, ensuring that all feedback is gathered, seen, and acted up by the appropriate team member. Usually, the decisions and tasks in this process are split between team members at different stages of the development process, leading to confusion and endless revisions.
Using this approach to manage changes around web accessibility will only drag out a project that needs to be turned around quickly in order to reduce legal liability and improve the customer experience. Here’s why:
Depending on how your website is built, you may need to make significant changes not just to the public-facing elements on your site, but to the code and structure of the entire site itself. In some cases, starting from scratch to re-code everything might even be the most cost-effective solution for your business.
After testing your site for accessibility issues, creative and web teams will then need a clear workflow to assign and track suggested revisions and a way to review new code and demonstrate to stakeholders in context how those changes will impact the site’s existing design and functionality. As you develop against ADA standards, it’s imperative to make sure that nothing gets lost in the shuffle of images, code, functionality, and design and that progress remains iterative.
Like any web project, designers, writers, web developers, QA testers, IT managers all need to become experts in how their contributions (text, forms, images, code) are impacted by accessibility. Because remediation changes will come from different areas of the business throughout the redevelopment process, it’s imperative to track suggestions and the status of tasks across teams in relation to the web content itself.
If you’re developing websites for clients, they’ll need to have a clear understanding of the revisions you’re making to their site (and why it’s critical that they should pay you to re-develop their sites in the first place.) Clients will not only need to be able to see and approve proposed changes without having full access to your production and staging environments, but they will also need a visual way to add comments and suggestions to multiple types of web content as you improve the accessibility of their web properties
Similarly, if you’re working with contracted designers or developers to help implement website changes, you’ll need a way to not only accept their design elements or code and link it to your internal review process and track their work in relation to other changes being made by your internal team.
Once you’ve addressed the current accessibility issues on your site, you’ll need a process moving forward to ensure that future modifications and digital initiatives remain compliant. As digital teams dip their toes even further into video, interactive, and AI content, they’ll need to ensure that accessible alternatives are also created during the development process, not after the fact.
The more time that your team spends modifying your website for accessibility means additional budget spent on website maintenance—and one more day that you’re taking on the risk and potential costs of non-compliance.
Before you begin updating your website to ADA standards, take a look at how your internal team manages the web production process and identify holes in collaboration steps to ensure accessibility updates can be implemented smoothly and with minimal review and revisions.
Using this approach to manage changes around web accessibility will only drag out a project that needs to be turned around quickly in order to reduce legal liability and improve the customer experience.
This checklist is not exhaustive, and the requirements for ADA compliance can vary depending on your website's complexity, content and your industry. But this checklist will cover every major factor to make your website ADA accessible.
Online proofing simplifies web content review by enabling reviewers to view web pages as they look in live or staged environments while also accessing the review tools needed to quickly communicate detailed on-page modifications to the entire web content team.
Furthermore, the proofing environment contextualizes web pages with other related elements and file types involved with website creation including images, text files, and more. All project files remain in one place--in iterative versions--so your team can track how accessibility initiatives are translating into web design.
Here’s how online proofing streamlines every stage of developing website properties for accessibility:
One of the challenges with sending images and multimedia content that is (or will be) included in web content around for review is that two versions can look extremely similar depending on the modifications that were made to the web page.
Side-by-side comparison in online proofing enables your team to review new versions of web pages against current or previous versions. Instead of marking up new versions with changes before sending around for team-wide review, the proofing environment can visually demonstrate to the viewer if the correct changes have been made in each iterative version that is created.
Proper web accessibility often involves modifications to colors and contrast. Online proofing in Ziflow also offers pixel-by-pixel comparison, so your team can identify even the most subtle changes that need to be made or have been made at the most detailed level.
Modifying your site for accessibility, from creating new layouts of existing pages and reformatting site architecture to changing on-page images and text, will likely mean communicating with multiple external sources.
If you’re working with a website with a high volume of product images, such as an e-commerce site, you’re likely pulling product images and descriptions from outside of your company. If you’re developing new content for clients, it’s possible that you’ll need to collect new content, or have them send updated logos and branded content. If you’ve contracted out the design, you’ll need a way for those freelancers to submit content to your team for your review.
Instead of trying to incorporate external collaboration via email, intake forms can be used to expedite the collection of web components that originate from outside of your organization through one form and workflow.
When it comes to updating web content, intake forms can be used to:
These web elements are added directly into your content proofing project, and your team can immediately use those web proofing tools like side-by-side and pixel-level comparison to review and modify submitted content.
Online proofing not only helps notify everyone when new versions of web content are ready for review and notify team members of review outcomes, but it also helps provide context about the reasons for different team members’ review.
When a team member is reviewing content, they can go a step further than simply approving/rejecting a current version of a proof and select a specific reason for their decision. For web content, marketing teams could add a “Change Required: Not ADA Compliant” reason to this decision list, allowing reviewers to specify why content is not in compliance.
Adding ADA reasoning into decision checklists achieves three very important compliance goals:
These decision checklists are especially useful for creating continual quality control around accessibility as your team develops new web content. By hard-coding ADA accessibility as an option during content review and creative decision-making, you can more easily demonstrate to customers, courts, and regulators that your company has a standard process for addressing web accessibility at the very initial stages of design and development.
When your team uses online proofing to manage website projects, they’ll not only have access to the right tools needed to review the detailed revisions required for web accessibility. They’ll also reduce the time spent on project communication, version management, progress tracking and implement strategic changes to website design and functionality on a much faster timeline.
ADA accessibility for digital spaces is a strategy that encompasses web design, coding, graphic design, copywriting, and digital marketing and requires tactical web development tools on top of a centralized review and approval environment.
Whether you need to evaluate the scope of accessibility changes you should be making to your site or need to check if you’re on the right track during website development, these solutions can aid the revision process.
Elsevier's User Centered Design (UCD) group has published a microsite that includes a searchable checklist of all available accessibility standards. Web designers, developers, and testers can filter guidelines by WCAG and Section 508 and by different web elements (tags, forms, links, tables, etc.) It’s a useful go-to reference point for the entire team involved with digital marketing and website creation.
Web consulting firm Off-Site Services simplifies compliance for on-site images with an interactive tool that tests image contrast and readability. Users can run ADA validation against any image and enter the background and foreground color codes to check the color contrast between image elements. The company also provides full-scale development and design services for web accessibility.
Accessibility Features:
Pricing: A free trial is available, with monthly plans starting at $40/month.
Tenon offers an automated accessibility tool that enables web development teams to test new code for accessibility in real-time. As you’re creating wireframes and templates, the tool’s API calls are a great way to ensure you’re meeting accessibility guidelines before project completion.
Accessibility Features:
Pricing: Pricing information not available. Request a demo to learn more.
Compliance Sheriff software enables companies to conduct an automated scan of their websites for WCAG 2.0/AA/AAA and Section 508 standards and generate a report with prioritized Top 10 remediation suggestions. The company also offers end-to-end accessibility solutions, including consulting and training, to help brands implement repeatable, accessibility checkpoints.
Accessibility Features:
Pricing: Pricing Information Not Available
The Bureau of Internet Accessibility’s A11Y Testing Platform helps brands manage compliance by instantly identifying accessibility issues per WCAG 2.0 standards and continually monitoring sites for new and recurring issues. The platform displays specific lines of code that need remediation and offers suggested changes with examples.
Accessibility Features:
Pricing: Pricing Information Not Available
Deque offers a free accessibility plug-in for developers in Chrome. The accessibility checker can be used to evaluate HTML-based user interfaces for WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 accessibility. They also provide a range of solutions and services to integrate directly into the testing environment.
Accessibility Features:
Pricing: Pricing information not available. Request a demo to learn more.
There’s no way around it: ADA web accessibility concerns are on the rise--in the courts and in the code of major retailers. No matter what industry you work in, if you’re maintaining websites for your company or your brand, it’s time to start taking an assessment of how to improve web functionality for consumers with visual, auditory, and other sensory limitations and creating a roadmap for implementing those design changes on your website in the most cost- and time-effective process possible.
Using an online proofing environment and other accessibility assessment tools can help expedite the revision process for new changes to your website, mitigate downtime during web development, and get you closer to ADA compliance faster than typical web development processes.