3 Myths about Websites and ADA Compliance

Feb 25, 2022

Nowadays, having a business involves not just your physical location but also your online presence. When you think about it, you wouldn’t want to exclude any potential clients from coming into your location, so why would you want to exclude people from interacting with your website? You may think that making your website accessible to everyone it’s a hard thing to do, or that ADA compliance maybe doesn’t even apply to you. The truth is, it probably does. Aside from making your website ADA compliant to help those that need it, doing so also helps protect you from being sued for non-compliance. Let’s take a deep dive into ADA compliance.

What is ADA?

The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) is a United States law that passed back in 1990. Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination “on the basis of disability in the activities of public accommodations”, in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public. The purpose of the law is to make sure that people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else.

This law was initially written with regard to physical locations - an example of this is public buildings made accessible to people with disabilities by putting ramps and automatic doors. However, now that the Internet plays a huge role in our day-to-day lives, websites must be ADA compliant as well. If a website is found to be inaccessible to people with disabilities, the website owner may be required to pay monetary damages and attorneys’ fees.

Myth #1: ADA compliance doesn't apply to me.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that all people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. This means that the content on your website should also be available and accessible to all, including those with hearing or visual impairments.

So, can you get sued if your website is not compliant? The answer is that any website belonging to a business with at least 15 employees, that is open more than 20 weeks a year is required to comply with the ADA. You can do the math yourself, but even if you don’t fall into that category, do you really want to lose potential clients?

You may think the number of people with such disabilities is not a significant amount and so you may think that it is not necessary to spend time, money, and effort to optimize your website, but you couldn’t be more wrong.

Over 12 million people in the USA are visually impaired, while 61 million Americans live with a disability. That makes 26 percent of the US population (1 in 4 people has some type of disability). Do you really want to be excluding 26% of potential clients?

Imagine just how frustrating it would be if you had special needs and you had to go online for some information, and the website you try to access is not ADA compliant. Imagine that you require a screen reader to read the information and, in this case, it isn’t able to work and you are not able to get the necessary information. Or imagine that you are cannot hear and you are supposed to get information from a video that happens to NOT have captions. You wouldn't want to be in THAT situation, so would you really want your current or potential clients to be?

Myth #2: An ADA Compliant website isn't important right now.

As we have discussed previously, ADA compliance is very important for your business and for those with special needs. In the case of digital information, it allows people with vision or hearing impairment, as well as people with cognitive difficulties or other needs, to get access to web content like multimedia, electronic documents, e-commerce platforms, and website pages using a range of assistive devices.

Let’s dive deeper into what exactly this could look like:

Blind people often use screen readers, which interpret data shown on the screen and read it out loud. This is where some problems can occur, because if the fonts are not large enough or the colors have a high enough contrast, the readers may not be able to read the text. Furthermore, visually impaired people often need images described to them since they are not able to see them. That is why web developers will add descriptive alt (alternative) text in the website’s HTML code. That way their screen readers are able to read this. Did you know that Amazon, (that’s right! Amazon!) was sued exactly because of this? Previously, they didn’t have alternative descriptions of images on their website, therefore not allowing people using screen readers to navigate and buy products online. Ouch! You can’t say they didn’t deserve it!

What about people with hearing impairments? Creating video content on the Internet is one of the fastest-growing industries, so when creators skip adding subtitles to their videos, it makes getting that information difficult for those with hearing difficulties. Netflix was sued exactly because of this. In 2011, because of the lack of closed-captioning, the courts decided that they were discriminating against deaf people.

We might fix our issues with the alt text and subtitles, but we should not forget that there are people with disabilities that include motor impairment. Some of these people cannot rely on the mouse or the trackpad to navigate their computers and must depend entirely on their keyboard. This means that ADA-compliant websites must allow viewers to navigate through websites using their keyboards via shortcuts and keyboard commands only.

As you can see, making a website compliant shouldn’t just be done because of the legal aspects, but because it’s simply the right thing to do.

Myth #3: I have to recreate my entire website to be ADA compliant.

Now that you have an understanding of just how important ADA compliance for your website is, how easy is it to actually get it done? First, you need to conduct an ADA-compliance evaluation and then prioritize the items that you will need to fix. Some of the adjustments may be an easy fix while others may require the services of a professional. Do you have to recreate your entire website? Most likely not. Start with an assessment and prioritize the steps you are able to take today and then move forward from there.

Here are some of the things that may come up in your evaluation. There are other features that need to be evaluated beyond this list but this is just a short example.

- Language – screen readers don’t know what language the content is in, so web developers should add that in the code

- Fonts, font size, capitalization – all of those things should be properly done, so readers can recognize them

- Descriptive links – all links should be written in an understandable way, so users know what to expect when they click on them

All in all, achieving ADA compliance for your website is not that hard. With the help of expert developers, you will not only avoid getting sued, but you will do a good deed for the community and potential clients. By making your website accessible to all, you open up your business to more people. We hope you take this into consideration and take matters into your own hands as soon as possible!

Sidekick Solutions gives clients support with online reviews, social media management, ADA compliance for websites, lead generation and many other services. We love watching our clients' businesses grow! Contact us at [email protected]