Making a website compliant and ensuring that it’s accessible for everyone is essential today. Not only is there an increased risk of lawsuits, but it’s also the right thing to do. No one likes not being able to shop where they please, which is essentially what it feels like as a disabled person when a site is too difficult to use. Here are three essential website compliance tips to help businesses.
Start with the Accessibility Basics
Look through your website from the perspective of people with different kinds of disabilities. Try to put yourself in their shoes and see how the current website fares. If you install a screen reader, what you may discover is that the reader struggles to locate the right information or to read it out in an appropriate order. This can confuse blind visitors.
Insufficient contrast between the foreground and the background might not be a problem for people with perfect vision but, those with failing vision, or struggling with cataracts, for example, will need added color contrast options. See how the site looks with high contrast mode turned on in Windows or Mac.
Use an Accessibility Tool to Speed Things Up
If you feel as though the process to improve the site will require too much time, use a tool like accessiBe to speed it up. Rather than resolving problems piecemeal, an accessibility tool like this can confirm each area that needs work, and how many changes are necessary to meet the right standards. Distribute the tasks amongst a few team members to complete the accessibility update sooner.
Check the Site is Compliant Now
While scanning a site to spot the pages that aren’t compliant is useful to do, it’s even more important to re-scan later after changes have been put in place. Never assume that once the changes are all done, the site is fine. Some accessibility aspects may have gotten missed when the updates were rolled out. New accessibility problems may also have been inadvertently introduced. Also, any new articles or pages added, or site design tweaks performed while the accessibility push was ongoing may have added new wrinkles too.
Once you’re all set, worrying about potential legal entanglements due to an inaccessible website should be a thing of the past.
