ADA Compliance and Your Website was written by Tevin Mallory in Marketing
Whether you are trying to sell your services, provide access to resources, or simply build up your brand’s recognition, your website is how you present your brand online. Especially for businesses in the community association industry, where you’re providing quality-of-life services to residents from all walks of life, your website needs to be inclusive to all.
When considering how to build up the online presence for their business, many small business executives forget about something super important: making sure that everyone can access their new website—especially those with impairments and disabilities.
By ensuring that your website is ADA compliant, you not only promote inclusivity but also open up opportunities to enhance user experience and to generate more leads for your business.Â
What is Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility refers to websites that are usable for people with disabilities. It commonly involves designing and developing websites in a way that people with disabilities, such as those with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments, can have a seamless browsing experience on a website and with its content. This includes individuals who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers, to access the web.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are over 1 billion people worldwide who have some form of disability—and that number is expected to rise as the global population ages. So making your website accessible is critical to serve this population.
It’s the Law: ADA Compliance
Accessibility is, first and foremost, a legal requirement under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It’s America’s most important law regarding accessibility and civil rights for people with disabilities. The DOJ has clarified that the ADA covers web accessibility for businesses that are open to the public. While there are some exemptions, making your best effort to ensure your website is accessible to all is always in your company’s best interest.Â
Maintaining ADA compliance helps protect your business from potential legal liabilities. Failure to meet ADA standards may result in lawsuits and fines, tarnishing your brand reputation and causing avoidable financial setbacks.
3 Benefits of an ADA-Compliant Website
Web accessibility ensures that everyone has equal access to information and services on the web, regardless of their abilities. But an accessible website can also provide benefits to visitors who are not disabled. In fact, there are a number of benefits for businesses to provide accessibility support:
Benefit 1: Enhanced Engagement
An ADA compliant website prioritizes user experience, providing intuitive navigation, clear content structure, and descriptive image text. These features not only accommodate users with disabilities, but they also improve the overall browsing experience for all visitors. An easily navigable and inclusive website fosters higher user engagement, longer session durations, and increased interactions. Ultimately, this leads to a higher likelihood of generating qualified leads and conversions as visitors are more likely to stay engaged, interact with the content, and take desired actions.
A user-friendly website not only enhances accessibility for all users, but it also reflects positively on your business’s brand and reputation. Implementing ADA compliance demonstrates your business’s commitment to inclusivity and fairness, contributing to a positive brand image. This can result in a loyal customer base and increased referrals as users appreciate your dedication to creating an accommodating and welcoming online environment.
Benefit 2: Boosting Website Traffic
ADA compliant websites often follow best practices for search engine optimization (SEO), which can positively impact your search rankings. With Google constantly calculating search engine result page (SERP) rankings by evaluating sites based partly on web page usability and user experience, it logically follows that websites with more accessibility features would be prioritized over sites without those accommodations.
By optimizing your website for accessibility, you not only improve user experience but also boost your chances of ranking higher in organic searches, driving more organic traffic and potential leads to your site.
Benefit 3: Tax Credits
By ensuring that your website is accessible, your business may be eligible for a tax credit to help offset the costs of gaining compliance.Â
The tax credit, listed under Section 44 of the IRS Code, covers 50% of the expenses used to make your business more accessible, up to $5,000 per year. To qualify as an “eligible small business”, a company must have either reported gross receipts of less than $1 million or employed no more than 30 full-time employees in the previous tax year.
How to Implement ADA Web Compliance on Your WebsiteÂ
Gaining website compliance can take a lot of effort. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG 2 outline the many areas a website needs to be changed for compliance.
The guidelines define 5 major categories of compliance, which include if the website is perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. There are nearly 60 individual tests a site has to pass for full compliance. For an average website, there may translate to hundreds of changes that need to be implemented to accommodate these guidelines.
accessiBe: A Simple Solution
However, it is possible to achieve an ADA compliant website without having to put in the time and energy to make all these changes by hand. After going through the exercise for our own website, we found an excellent tool called accessiBe that does all the compliance work for you. You can see an example of it now right here. Look for the icon in the lower left-hand corner of this page.
There are multiple predefined profiles that you can set for specific accessibility needs, or you can manually change from over 30 settings to modify the website to make it easier for you to use. It supports 4 major screen readers, enables keyboard navigation for the site, and can change colors, font sizes, colors and hyperlinks.
The product, accessWidget is an AI-powered solution that implements an AA level of ADA compliance tools on your site automatically. It’s quick to get it up and running and maintains digital accessibility long-term. (AA level is one step down from the most stringent level, AAA. AA level is considered the standard target for web compliance.)
We love it so much, we’ve partnered with accessiBe to offer the same functionality to our clients. Are you interested in becoming ADA compliant? Contact us today to learn more about how we can implement ADA compliance to elevate your website and fuel your marketing efforts towards growth and success.
Let’s make your website a welcoming space for all—empowering inclusivity, driving leads, and inspiring success.
Marketing Advice in Your Inbox
Marketing your small business can be a challenge, especially when you are trying to take care of your clients at the same time. The marketing montage gives you actionable tips, advice and best practices to help you make small changes each month that will make a big impact. Before you know it, you'll be a marketing master just like one of those training montages in the movies.
Fill in the form to subscribe to our CAM Marketing Montage