Is your website ADA compliant?
It’s not the sexiest topic in the world: Compliance.
However, the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) is a very important one. When you start diving into legal quagmires, such as this one, it can quickly get overwhelming and stressful - so we’re here to break it down in plain English.
Essentially: The ADA ensures that various environments are accessible for those with disabilities. Your website falls under that category.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of specific guidelines to mentor you through the process of ensuring that your website is ADA compliant. Nevertheless, by looking at lawsuits and examples of perfectly accessible websites, we can do our very best to ensure that all users have an exceptional experience when they find us online.
Alt text
You might have heard the buzz around this on Instagram towards the end of last year. Alt text is any additional wording that might make visual content easier to access. For example, those who are visually impaired may use audio website readers to describe the picture or video they are accessing. To ensure that they have the most descriptive experience, you can:
- Add alt text to all images
- Add video transcripts alongside video content
- Ensure that videos have subtitles
Navigation
People move around our websites in many different ways. To make this as seamless and easy as possible, we must ensure that our websites are user-friendly and customisable, for example:
- Websites should be totally accessible using a keyboard alone (no mouse)
- Any moving parts on the website should be able to be paused and replayed
- Nothing should flash more than 3 times within a second (think banners, pop-ups etc.)
- If forms or pop-ups are time sensitive (i.e they disappear or timeout after a certain amount of time has elapsed), they must be able to be extended
Visuals
Remember that not everyone viewing your site will be able to access all visual content. For this reason, we must try to convey information in different ways, making sure that everyone can ‘see’ the content we’ve lovingly put together. We can do this in a few ways:
- By not using colour alone to illustrate something e.g graphs, pie charts or graphics
- By making our websites flow in a logical and understandable order
- By allowing for a colour contrast ratio (a setting that dictates the saturation and contrast of the colours on your page) of at least 4.5:1, between all text and background
- By allowing text to be maximised by up to 200%
- By not using images of text in place of actual text (i.e PNG graphics with words on them)
Titles
When navigating around our website, we want to make sure that users can easily find the content they are looking for. To make sure this is the case, we can:
- Give pages clear and obvious titles and URLs
- Use H1 and H2 title text to divide up our pages (these are formatting options for entering copy into your webpage - title text is picked up by search engines before bulk text. Check with your website provider for more information)
- Use descriptive headings and labels as much as possible
- Set a language for the entire website (i.e US English, British English etc.)
There are many more ways in which we can make a website as ADA compliant as possible - these are just a few examples and suggestions to help illustrate how we might make the internet a more inclusive place - something we care about over here at Ocean Digital.
It’s important that we make sure our potential customers and clients can find us, resonate with us and actually connect with our content, however they are accessing it.
If you want to know more about how you can make your site a tip-top example of ADA compliance, check out Accessibility.org - a fantastic resource that’s hoping to unjumble the confusion around making accessibility second nature.
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