Having an ADA-compliant website is more important than ever. It shows your sensitivity to those differently-abled individuals, and of course, it’s just the right thing to do.

This website is an ADA-compliant website, and you can tell from the small circle with the icon of a person in it in the lower left corner. If you click that icon, you’ll see how having an ADA-compliant site works: a pop-up window comes up that offers individuals different ways to alter our site so it works best for their disability. It does things like:

• Content Adjustments that allows them to change the point size of the type, the typeface itself, as well as the spacing between letters and lines
• Color and Display adjustments let people  change the color on our website to higher contrast colors incase they have a difficult time reading the text
• Changing the navigation functions that allows people to use their keyboard to navigate the website opposed to using their mouse to do that, and
• Even allows them to switch the text to any of 14 different languages.

The importance of an ADA-compliant website.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was designed to guarantee individuals with vision or hearing impairments, or a variety of other disabilities, have the same opportunities as the rest of us. That law was enacted in 1999, but now that the internet is considered a ”utility,” ADA-compliance now includes websites, as well.  According to the CDC, in the U.S., there are now more than 5 million adults with either visual or hearing impairments.

Also, it doesn’t take much effort to make your site compliant, so why not have it done?  For $490 a year, you subscribe to the services of a company called AccessiBe. Once you have a subscription, your web design company places AccessiBe’s code on your website.  Hopefully, you consider that cost a relatively small price to pay for assuring you’re making sure everyone can navigate your website.

An ADA-compliant website might help with your SEO.

At this time, we haven’t found anything from Google stating that having ADA-compliant website is a ranking factor for search engines.

However, an organization called Accessibility Checker did a study called “Does Web Accessibility Have a Positive Impact on SEO?” we found of interest. It’s well-done, and formatted so you can link directly to sections like “The Study at a Glance,” and “Findings.

Disabled individuals have become “plaintiffs” in class action lawsuits’

Recent history shows disabled individuals become “plaintiffs” in class action lawsuits against websites that aren’t ADA-complaint. Those folks consider themselves activists working to improve the internet, as well as society as a whole, for the disabled.

If your web design company doesn’t offer this for your site, you might consider a different web designer

Has your web design company offered this functionality for your website? If not, it’s possible you should consider another website design firm.

This short video, below, from AccessiBe gives you more information. Of course, if you want to talk about having us help make your website ADA-compliant, contact us today.