ADA Website Compliance Q&A Part 1

ADA Website Compliance is still one of the most important things a business needs to worry about and take control of in 2024. Even with everyone still coming out of the COVID Crisis, ADA Website Compliance keeps you out of trouble with the courts while making your site SEO friendly.

Here are some common questions we get asked when discussing ADA Compliance with prospective clients.

1.) Why do I need to worry about the ADA for a website?
You need to worry about being ADA compliant for 2 very important reasons. One is to keep your business out of trouble for violating federal guidelines The second reason primarily deals with SEO as most major search engines (besides just Google) look to ADA guidelines as best practices for on-site S.EO.

2.) How do I know if my site is ADA compliant?
There are over 50 different guidelines and requirements within the world-wide web consortium’s (W3C) evaluation criteria. This is considered the gold standard in ADA rules. The easiest way to keep up with ADA compliance is to hire a firm that specializes in it like ours.

If you have to take care of it yourself, there are several different plugins and tools you can add to your site like WAVE and Lighthouse. Lastly you can do a manual audit and go through each page of your site and compare to the W3C listings. This is very cumbersome and costly.

3.) What is an Accessibility Statement and do I need one?
According to the Essential Accessibility resource and site, an Accessibility Statement is “a public information page that relays your internal organizational policies, your accessibility goals, and your past successes when it comes to serving and working with people who have disabilities.” Our accessibility statement has the ways we work to keep our site ADA compliant and gives tips to find ways to adjust the reader’s browser settings and improve their experience outside of our site as well.

We get several questions about this and other topics, we’ll continue to publish our responses in future posts.