Businesses are being hit with ADA website compliance litigation without notice. Don’t let yours be next.
Government compliance for businesses has always been around and its not going anywhere anytime soon. It’s one of those things that businesses have to deal with in order to be in compliance and operate a business.
Recently, one of the most challenging mandatory compliance requirements is that websites must be accessible to persons with disabilities. The word that should be emphasized and concentrated on is “mandatory.”
There is no choice. Website compliance to provide accessibility to persons with disabilities is now mandatory and the costs, expenses and penalties that arise when compliance is not followed can wreck a small business and place tremendous strain on even medium and large sized businesses' monetary progress.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), first enacted in 1990, now applies to websites as well. There have been a flood of lawsuits filed against websites in recent years and it will continue. The only way to avoid them and ensure that the economic impact of a lawsuit does not hit your business is to get into compliance.
This article is written to provide an ADA Website Compliance Checklist to help your business understand the importance of website accessibility compliance and how to make it happen so your website and company are in the best position to avoid exposure to an ADA noncompliance claim and the expensive litigation costs that can come with a claim or lawsuit.
The included ADA website checklist is designed to assist in creating a process to follow to bring a website into compliance with the ADA. It should be understood that updating your website to become ADA compliant is a process. It will take some time and not happen overnight.
Understand that ADA compliance with the ADA is a strict compliance law not to be taken lightly.
Why is an ADA website compliance checklist important?
Having a checklist is essential in order to make sure your website has the minimal compliance necessary to comply with what is now the standard for website ADA compliance under the Website Compliance Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). International standards (ISO) for accessible website compliance have been put in place and in the United States these standards have been adopted by the federal government and are now being enforced in federal and state courts.
Is ADA compliance mandatory for websites?
Under the ADA, website compliance is mandatory. There are few exceptions such as churches and religious organizations and depending on the building, an exception for historical building preservation is provided.
Aside from these exceptions, a website must comply with the minimum requirements of the WCAG guidelines. This means federal, state, and local governments must also comply and any company or business that has a website that promotes goods and services for sale must also comply with the law.
Follow These ADA Website Compliance Steps To Make Your Website Compliant?
The ADA website compliance checklist is provided in the steps below. Use these guidelines as an ADA website compliance test to ensure your website meets the accessibility and compliance standards.
One thing to understand about ADA website compliance is that there is a difference between website accessibility and website compliance. A website can be accessible but not necessarily in compliance. That is the reason that a website compliance accessibility test should be part of a website accessibility compliance process.
Using the following ADA website compliance checklist guidelines should set the stage for how an ADA website compliance test should be used to get the maximum benefit from any website accessibility compliance efforts.
There are four (4) main things to check for website compliance with the ADA.
1. A website must be perceivable.
2. The website must be operable
3. An ADA website compliant website must be understandable
4. The website must robust
The comprehensive checklist, if followed, will ensure that any website meets the required accessibility standards.
ADA Website Accessibility vs. Website Compliance?
A website can be accessible but still not compliant. The reason is because there are three different levels of accessibility to a website. These levels are categorized as Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA.
A website can be accessible under either of these levels of accessibility but only Level AA is considered to be fully compliant as far as the regulatory law is concerned. Therefore, when addressing issues of accessibility and compliance the standard of accessibility and compliance should be to meet the level of compliance required by Level AA of the WCAG. These are covered in the checklist.
Level AAA is the highest standard and a mark that ultimately a website owner might want to meet but currently is not necessary for full compliance purposes. Level AAA should be sought where a website owner wants to maximize the websites use to brand its product or company name and to give the best disability access experience to a disable visitor or user of the website.
It also maximizes the website owners best practice for marketing purposes and assisting with generating prospects and sales from the disable user market. This market is huge and has over 400 billion dollars in discretionary income to spend on goods and services.
Level A, the lowest level of accessibility for ADA purposes provides some limited accessibility to persons with disabilities but is far from being compliant. At best, it should be viewed as a website owners first step in the process of making a website compliant with the requires of the ADA.
Website accessibility is a process and it should be a part of any businesses practice to comply with the ADA and then maintain its compliance on a continuous basis. In order to do this, compliance with Level AA should be the goal and once obtained it will have to be maintained by and through a website’s development team or it should be assigned to an outside consultant that will stay on top of the continuing changes that will become necessary for compliance and compliance update purposes.
How To Perform an ADA Website Compliance Test
The best way to find out what your website needs for ADA compliance purposes is to have an ADA Website Compliant test as part of a website’s ADA Website Compliance Checklist.
There are numerous ADA compliance services that offer to provide a free ADA website compliance test audit. These are usually artificial intelligent robots or bots that scan a website and will determine some basic things the website needs in order to be accessible for the most fundament disability access compliance requirements.
However, these bots or artificial intelligent software functions should not be relied upon or assumed to be an answer to all of the accessibility issues that a particular website might have.
To rely on these robotics would be a mistake. In order to have a website fully accessible and fully compliant a website must be manually reviewed and tested to determined the specifics for what is needed. This will take some time and it will have some expenses associated with it.
Putting your website in an accessible position using a bot or a line of code may be better than nothing but it should only be a starting point and there should be information listed on your website to let any person with a disability visiting your site that you are in the process of making your website fully accessible and give them information to contact you should they encounter any accessible issues in the meantime.
Doing this may not stop a claim or lawsuit but it will show good faith if done the right way and there is a showing that a process is in place to move to the minimum Level AA ADA accessible standard as soon as possible.
Use the ADA Website checklist items listed in this article to make sure that your website meets the minimum requirements.
Get a complete guideline on how to get a website into compliance and avoid a claim or lawsuit for lack of website accessibility.
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