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ADA Compliant Websites

There was a time when businesses didn't have to worry about their website being ADA compliant. But those days are long gone. From having descriptive tags on images and forms to making sure content is accessible, both in terms of its structure and viewability, ADA compliance is an integral part of your website.

How To Make A Site ADA Compliant

There is no making a “good faith” attempt to address your organization’s web accessibility issues. Your organization must comply with WCAG 2.0 and the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). To make sure your organization's website is in compliance, consider the following steps:

Step One: Analysis of current ADA guidelines

Analyze your website to see if it complies with:

86 Tests Covering WCAG 1.0

86 Tests Covering WCAG 1.0

The WCAG 1.0 guidelines were published in 1999, and explain how to make web content accessible to people with disabilities.

118 Tests Covering WCAG 2.0

118 Tests Covering WCAG 2.0

WCAG 2.0 was published in 2008, and covers a wide range of recommendations for making your web content more accessible. It covers a wider range of disabilities than WCAG 1.0 including: blindness and low vision, learning disabilities, speech disabilities, deafness and hearing loss, cognitive limitations, limited movement, photosensitivity and combinations of these.

55 Tests Covering Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act

55 Tests Covering Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (amended 29 U.S.C. 794d) requires that U.S. federal employees with disabilities have access to information comparable to employees without disabilities.

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Step Two: Report on non-compliance issues

Generate a report that identifies the areas of your website that are not compliant.

Step Three: Develop a plan

Develop an action plan that prioritizes the issues that need to be fixed and how to best maintain compliance. This includes developing an action plan for training your staff that generates web content moving forward to be focused on web accessibility for all users. Your action plan should attempt to balance the cost of enacting the changes and how the changes will affect overall website usability for all users.

Step Four: Begin fixing ADA issues on your website

Fix the issues that were found with your website. This often involves working with the vendor or internal team that created your website to ensure they understand the web accessibility standards and guidelines and are trained on how to best address them.

Step Five: Monitor for future issues

Since most website content is constantly changing, we highly recommend repeating the testing process from time to time to address issues and train any new staff on the rules and best practices surrounding accessibility. This reporting should be stored with your perinate records to again help reinforce to outside parties your efforts to make your organization’s website ADA accessible.

You can also install to a plugin that helps ensure constant ADA compliance.

Why Should My Organization Address This Issue?

Government agencies, nonprofit organizations, public schools, and now even private businesses are receiving complaints and legal notices that they are discriminating against disabled individuals because they do not have an ADA-compliant website, according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Section 508 accessibility standards.

Although the courts are still defining exactly what it means for websites to be “compliant,” under the existing laws about discriminating against disabled individuals, these formal complaints and cases often focus on whether the website owner took appropriate steps to ensure web accessibility.

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