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Over the past 10 years, the Department of Justice issued new regulation standards for all websites to follow—the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Standard for Accessible Design. This means that all website content and design must be fully accessible for those with disabilities.
If you aren’t properly following regulations, your company can even face potential lawsuits. To ensure your company is taking the right steps to follow ADA compliancy regulations, here’s some important information you need to know.
What does it mean to have a website that’s ADA compliant?
Browsing the Internet should be something that everyone can enjoy, regardless of a physical disability. To put this in perspective, 25 million people in the US alone have a visual impairment, and over 30 million have a hearing impairment. ADA compliancy ensures that any individual can still properly navigate your website, thanks to design choices that support their disability.
What can happen if your website isn’t ADA compliant?
If your website isn’t following proper regulations, there are several negative impacts it can have on your company:
- You risk losing potential leads and customers that cannot navigate your website. This also paints your company in a negative light, since it shows you aren't making an effort to make your website more accessible to all visitors.
- The law requires your website to be ADA compliancy. Failure to abide by regulations can lead to lawsuits against your company, resulting in fines.
- If your company works with federal, municipal, or local government, you could lose funding as a result of neglecting regulations.
What can you do to follow ADA compliancy regulations?
There are many ways you can improve navigation on your website to comply with ADA regulations. Here are some methods you can start to address:
- A visitor should be able to navigate your website without the requirement of a computer mouse. In other words, they should have the option to use a keyboard to tab between links, forms, and other webpage directories.
- For those with visual impairments, navigation links and webpage content can use audio to directly speak to the visitor. This will let them know what they are hovering over before making a click.
- If a visitor has trouble hearing, it’s important to have subtitles in any of the videos embedded on your website. This also holds true for any audio components on your website, such as offering text translated versions of podcasts.
- Your website’s font size and color can be difficult for a visitor to read, resulting in many abandoned sessions. You’ll want to use a suitable font size in standard paragraph copy (around 12-14 point font), and ensure that any text is still readable when it’s displayed on a colored background.
Keeping your website ADA compliant isn’t just beneficial for your audience; it’s mandatory by law. If your b2b company is looking to implement some website design changes, thinkdm2 can provide the guidance you need. Our experience in b2b website design can help you create a website that’s fully optimized to increase website engagement and make it easy for your visitors to navigate.
