How to Make a Website ADA Compliance According to Lighthouse

What is ADA Compliance?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was formed in 1990 and it is intended to assure that people with disabilities have the equivalent opportunities as anyone else. This means any businesses that serve or offering services to the public must make sure their building accommodates people with various kinds of disabilities. ADA compliance applies to websites and mobile apps also. This means people who have disabilities (Vision, hearing, and physical) can access your website.

In the US any website that fails to comply with ADA is excluding some groups of users with a differing degree of impairments.   

ADA is the common practice of making a website’s content available to everyone.

Principal areas of disabilities in the context of A11Y:

1. Visual issues: can vary from an incapability to recognize colors to no vision at all.
2. Hearing issues: Specific or particular user hearing issues make him/her unable to hear the sounds comes from the website or page.
3.  Mobility issues: In this case, the user will have the inability to use a mouse, a keyboard, or touch-screen.
4. Cognitive issues: Cognitive issues are broad, in this case, user require assistive technologies to assist them with reading text.

Above issues in ranges very broad. This means that one doesn’t require to have a critical impairment to need A11Y assistance.

Advantages of having an ADA Compliance website

• Increases Target Audience

ADA compliance provides the benefit of access to all customers including people with disabilities. The United States has approximately 50 million people with a disability. If your website is not ADA compliant, you are missing millions of potential customers who cannot access your site due to their disabilities. Many of them might be inspired in your products or services, but once they land at your website, they won’t be able to operate easily enough to buy anything or won’t able to contact you because your website is only open to people without inabilities. Thus, results in losing customers as well as business.

• Enhances SEO Rankings

Now more than ever, search engines become very advanced and perform quick searches by crawling the web pages. Developing a website that meets the WCAG guidelines will please to users, Search engines, and screen readers thus result in good SEO rankings. For this speculation, meta tagging, alternative image text, and video transcripts should be seriously contemplated.

• Better website Usability

Successful organizations or businesses already proved that having a simple operable and navigable website will eventually serve all users. Bounding to WCAG guidelines will make your web pages easier to perceive to all. And helps to obtain what they’re looking for quickly. Being an ADA compliance will give you more leads from all customers and that will develop a trust that they can anything they want easily.

What has to be done on a website to get ADA Compliance

ADA official website has listed multiple suggestions to obtain the ADA compliance– however, there are many more considerations.

1. An alt tag must be inserted in each and every image, video, audio file, and plug-in, etc.
2. Compact graphics are guided by full-text descriptions. And these full-text alt descriptions explain the scope of the objects.
3. Make sure that alt tag describes the image graphics and the link address.
4. Add Alt descriptions to the decorative graphics that do not have any other function

• Add titles to videos
• Add audio information
• Create a text transcript
• Instead of embedding the video into web pages create a link to the video
• Add media player link to download and view the videos.
• Add an extra link for transcribing the text
• The page should contain alternative links to the Image Map

5. The <area> tags on the pages must include an alt attribute
6. Columns and rows headers in the date tables are properly identified (using the <th> tag)
7. Table cells are associated with the relevant headers (e.g. with the id, headers, scope and etc.)
8. Make certain the page does not contain repeatedly speeding images
9. A link is presented on a disability-accessible page where the plug-in can be downloaded

All Java applets, scripts and plug-ins (including Acrobat PDF files and PowerPoint files, etc.) and the content within them are accessible to assistive technologies

10. When form controls are text input fields use the label element
11. Use the title attribute when text is not available
12. Add any special instructions within field labels on forms and logical fields in the tab order.
13. Add a ‘Skip Navigation’ button to help those using text readers

There are so many additional things to take care of

1. Fonts and colors have been formulated within certain variables.
2. All the HTML of the pages must be installed with extra script tags whether they be static or dynamic pages.
3. There are multiple adaptive technologies to assist the disabled in appealing websites. Building a website work for each and all of them is a strenuous task that requires a lot of human efforts cost more to any business.

The ADA act is actually dictating a desire that websites be far fewer graphics and much more text-based which is 180° opposite of the newest trends and for what actually works for helping businesses to generate new clients.

There are multiple tools for testing ADA Compliance for your website. We’d suggest Lighthouse (A Google product).

Bear in mind that making these changes WILL probably affect your website’s layout and functionality on some browsers.

Conclusion

Make sure your website content is available in various forms for various devices and audiences, make your website logical and easy to use, and make your website technically sound. Obtaining ADA compliance will provide the chance to provide better content on the web pages used for one or more people. And makes the internet a better place for all.