Is your website ADA compliant?

Ensuring all consumers can access and easily use your website is critical. After all, it’s literally your digital property; you want to empower folks to feel welcome in your space, and comfortable using your site. As an organization working within today’s society, ADA accessibility is the nice, decent thing to do, but in America, it’s also the law: the Americans With Disabilities Act, or ADA, sets the accessibility standards for public and private sector physical locations but also for websites. Keeping your site compliant with ADA standards will increase brand loyalty, build brand integrity and improve SEO. Depending on yearly profits, some businesses might even be eligible for a $5,000 tax credit. A bonus? Your legal team can sidestep any surprise lawsuits over unmet ADA requirements on your site, which is seemingly occurring more often.

What does ADA compliance mean?

Websites are specifically under ADA Title II, which uses the WCAG 2.1 to set baseline requirements for accessibility.

Pollinate recommends AA or above, which means meeting the following standards:

Contrast
Text and background colors contrast enough to be easy to read.

Site Navigation
Users can navigate your site with keyboard strokes only.

Screen Reading Software
Additional information at the code level enables the visually impaired to use screen reading software on your website.

Text Sizes
This will also allow for text to be resized.

Closed Captioning
With social media, this is becoming more commonplace, but to reiterate: all videos on your site should be understandable for hearing-impaired folks.

Consider it Routine Maintenance

To ensure continued compliance, we recommend performing a quarterly accessibility audit on your site. Think of it like an oil change or a tire rotation for a car; your website needs a routine checkup to make sure everything’s running smoothly. Over time, small things get missed during content and code updates, creating new accessibility issues— especially with multiple people working on a site.

Our Recommendation

Making your organization’s digital space a safe, respectful and inclusive environment only helps you better serve a more diverse customer segment—and will open the door to more revenue. In fact, a 2018 report showed that the total after-tax disposable income for working-age people with disabilities is about $490 billion. In other words? It’s a crucial part of your path to brand fanaticism.

At Pollinate, we partner with AccessiBe, a leader in ADA compliance, to help our clients make sure their sites are ADA-accessible. Want to see the AccessiBe widget at work? It’s the little blue guy in the bottom right corner of our website. Ready to make sure your site is up to ADA standards? Give us a call—we can work to provide you a low-cost option to get your website accessible, and allow individual users to customize their own experience.

How It Works

• AccessiBe is a licensed widget with a yearly pass-through cost, starting at $490 a year.
• The Pollinate dev team can implement the widget in about 8 hours.
• We recommend a quarterly website audit, which takes anywhere from 2-15 hours depending on site size.
• The audit is followed up by a detailed report, along with a list of tasks (and how long they’ll take) to keep the site ADA compliant.
• You decide what you want to address, and the hours you can dedicate each quarter
• Note: In our experience, the more frequently you audit, the less you’ll likely need to invest to remain compliant.

Want more thoughts on ADA compliance? Reach out.