ADA Website Accessibility Compliance for People with Disabilities

July 29 2020

Blind Screen Reader - by Sigmund - Unsplash - 4MoIpDcSlr4

By Chadwick Meyer

We've gotten a lot of inquiries lately from business owners concerned about being sued over website accessibility by disabled persons. This is a complex situation that deserves some attention.

Websites Should be Accessible to All

We want all our websites to be accessible to people with disabilities, so that all visitors can use our client’s services equally. It’s good for disabled visitors and it’s good for our clients, because people with disabilities represent an important customer base. It’s a win win situation for everyone.

If you are aware of any errors on our websites that are in clear violation of ADA compliance or WCAG standards, please alert us and we will immediately evaluate and fix.

Current Gutensite Websites Implement Accessibility Standards

Your current Gutensite website already implements the basic accessibility best practice standards (as a principle, although there could be instances of a few images or links missing some critical code). You can download the WAVE Chrome Plugin (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) to look at your website to see where there are specific errors, and alerts.

But keep in mind that the presence of some errors or alerts, does not immediately signify that the site is in violation. You should have a professional evaluate the site and provide certifications if you have concerns. But the tool can give you confidence that the majority of the site is navigable and functional by people with disability, and further indicate potential ways to improve. For example it may give errors indicating "alt text too similar", when in fact there is a logical reason for that because it’s a visual element (e.g. two images that are quotation marks that are useful for visual users but not important for disabled persons navigation). Or it may say "contrast errors" if you have a white text on a light colored button that looks good for the average visitor (an aesthetic design decision). However, if this button contains alt text for the visually impaired, this error is not a violation. The intent of these standards is to ensure that people with disabilities can navigate your website, access your information and use your services. If you have made a reasonable good faith effort to do that, and indeed the website is functionality, you are likely compliant.

Gutensite’s Plan for ADA Compliance with WCAG standards

Our existing 1.0 platform is accessible to disabled visitors because we implement basic web standards. But we are continuing to improve access (and experience) to our customer’s website. Further improvements will be available in Gutensite new 2.0 platform. Our goal is to be as fully ADA compliant as possible. This is an immense project that is still in development and refinement, but we will release it as soon as possible.

Current Compliance Standards

It’s important to realize that 98% of websites online fail WCAG compliance standards. This is unfortunate, but it’s the reality because we are entering new undefined territory and it takes time (and money) to develop the necessary changes for compliance. So rest assured that your Gutensite is much better than most websites.

Also keep in mind that lawyers by definition have zero tolerance for risk and are going to recommend taking action in every case, because it costs them nothing to make that verbal recommendation (to cover their own liability). But as a business owner, you have to weigh the costs involved and make a decision what you want to pay for. Lawyers say things like, "a website may have to conform to the WCAG 2.0", the keyword here is "may". They then admitt, “The law is not entirely clear on whether your small businesss website qualifies as a place of public accommodation". Furthermore the often cited Dominos Pizza website Supreme Court case, did not resolve whether the website complied with ADA or whether having a toll free number was a reasonable alternative. In short, the law is unfortunately not well defined here. Furthermore, Dominos is a large corporation, with a website specifically built to do online orders, this is not the same scale or purpose of a small business or Realtor website which largely functions as an information website.

Recommendations

In the meantime there are things that can be done to at least show you are operating in good faith toward disabled visitors. You should consult your lawyer to finalize wording for a note on your website footer that says something like “We strive to be compliant with ADA accessibility and WCAG standards. If you have any problems using our website, please contact us immediately at [PHONE] to receive personal assistance and notify us of the problem so we can resolve it immediately.”

ADA Compliance Evaluation

It is your responsibility as a business owner to ensure that your website is ADA compliant. Even if our platform is 100% compliant, there is no one size fits all solution for all websites, because clients add their own content, links, images that may not have been given descriptive titles, videos or audio without closed accompanying text, and each site has its unique functionality. We can make sure that the main structure of the site has the basic accessibility tags, alt text, aria-labels, etc. But a business owner who is concerned about managing risk, will need to pay to have their own personal website evaluated and corrected if necessary.

There are services like WebAIM that offer evaluation and certification. If you fail certification as a result of specific violations caused by a failure of some code on our platform, Gutensite will be glad to make these changes to correct the specific problems.

Tags : legal, disabilities, compliance, ADA, WCAG, accessibility

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