ADA compliance is more important than ever when it comes to websites.
Ensuring your website is ADA compliant is not only important to avoid legal ramifications (ADA compliance related lawsuits are becoming more successful every day), but important to ensure anyone who needs to access your website can do so properly.
Not all businesses or organizations are required by law to be ADA compliant, but if you fall into any of the below categories it’s better to be safe than sorry:
- State and local government
- Public and private spaces
Employment
Building codes
Transportation
Telecommunication
Non-Profit – 501(c)3 businesses
ADA COMPLIANT WEBSITE GUIDELINES
Making your website ADA compliant is not too difficult. A lot of guidelines will most likely already be in place just by chance, and many adjustments will only take developers a short amount of time to implement.
However there are some guidelines that may be more difficult to implement, and could drastically alter your current website design. Some guidelines that are more challenging to accommodate include:
Text meeting a minimum contract ratio against the background
Websites being fully navigable by keyboard only, which typically includes things like skip navigation button and can require manually setting a tabindex across the site
Websites being fully navigable with screen reader software (which can be difficult to test); and
Websites being able to handle text being scaled up to 200% without causing horizontal scrolling or content-breaking layout issues.