During the earlier times of website design and development, accessibility was not the priority in the thoughts of the website owners, developers, and designers. Everyone was on the lookout for making their websites flashier and more attractive and ranking high on the search results. With these priorities, the first-generation websites were compromised on accessibility, making it difficult for people with disabilities to navigate the websites and understand the content.
However, this has been changed lately with the need for compliance with ADA or the Americans with Disabilities Act has made accessibility a mandatory need for websites. As W3C also mandated accessibility as a primary need in website development, the designers and developers are now talking more about this topic. All government websites should be compliant with accessibility regulations, which are now being extended to all sorts of private websites.
AccessiBe explains why accessibility is important
Suppose you are a blind man who needs to fill out an application online for a social security benefit. If the website you are going through has many images which describe the content, a screen reader may not be able to rightly infer the images and read them for your understanding. Blind people can only access the text on the website, and if the text is being replaced with an image, they will not be able to access that info. So, AccessiBe points out that the rules mandate the websites to follow ADA guidelines for easy accessibility.
For example, the websites need to have long descriptions and alt tags for all web pages’ images, videos, and graphics. The links on web pages need to be active links, which means that the destination URL is not simply a directory but an actual web page. There should also be descriptive texts on the pages, not just the titles. The text should not be placed on images but must be kept separately to be read by the screen readers.
These things can be incorporated into any webpage if the designers and developers take care of it during the site-building phase. It is not only blindness but also different other disabilities as well, which make people incapable of accessing the websites as normal people can do. From color blindness to dyslexia and cognitive disabilities, there are different conditions to limit their access to the web. By being ADA compliant, you will be catering to a larger number of people who can access your information.
Importance of ADA compliance
The ADA rule focus on making information available to all people regardless of the technology or strategy used. As per the Department of Justice, regulated through many lawsuits on accessibility, now it is being considered a very important issue. Us Department of Health and Human Services also has listed the resources, which include information about compliance with ADA and many fundamental things one should know to ensure accessibility.
So, if you are building a website that is confronting the public to share information, you should take extra care to meet accessibility compliance. AccessiBe also points out that this will help you rank high on the web search results as the latest algorithms of Google and other search engines crawl the accessibility features too to decide the page’s ranking.
