Accessibility has become the primary need to ensure while doing website development and design. The web developers and web designers need to ensure compliance with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), which will ensure that the website is reachable to more people and be crawled by Google for web search ranking. ADA mandates that all government and other websites need to qualify for the regulations related to federal assistance for the web. There are many tool developers and designers can make use of to ensure ADA compliance.

What is ADA?  

Suppose a blind person wants to make an online application for any social security or other federal support online. It is not just necessary for a social security support application website to have all flashy features and easy navigation. The ADA compliant features like screen readability for blind people to easily browse through it. AccessiBe points out that a blind will not be able to read the text or image cues but can only listen to the text to understand the page info. This is called compliance with ADA, and the Federal government has many specific rules related to ensuring ADA compliance.

• There should be alt tags for all the images and long descriptions for the images to describe the content of the images.

• The links need to be active to land on the destination page and not on any directory.

• The website should have descriptive text in each section. Just having titles is not enough. The text also should not be simply replaced with any image.

ADA mandates

Even though accessibility has been only mandated for government sites now, it is important for all websites to follow the accessibility rules to reach more people effectively. It can be easily ensured on any site during the time of development itself. It may be unfair if you do not treat the blind or deaf people who come to your website equally important. For a commercial website, accessibility is one measure to be ensured to widen the website’s reach, which further ends up in more conversions.

Besides what we discussed above, there can be many other types of disabilities that limit the access of differently-abled people to internet websites. There are possibilities for many such instances, from colorblindness to dyslexia or temporary handicapped. By ensuring ADA Compliant to your website, you are ideally catering to all types of people who access your info.

As we have seen above, making the web pages ADA compliant is so simple with handy tools like AccessiBe, and it requires only a few hours’ worth of effort to ensure accessibility compliance before launching your website. So, if you are building a new website or renewing the existing one to make it more friendly and popular, make sure you take accessibility into prime consideration. Go through the ADA Compliance ruleset and educate your website developer and designer also about the same if they already do not know these.