Incorporating accessibility features in a website requires functionality that allows someone to use screen-reading software to access the content without getting frustrated about their disabilities.
One-fourth of the US population is disabled and businesses that are accessible to the public need to ensure barrier-free access to their content, despite users' hearing or vision loss.
If you fail to do that, you are violating the law and will face legal repercussions. For example, a famous boutique hotel in Palm Springs faced a lawsuit not because their property was inaccessible to people in wheelchairs, but because their official website was inaccessible to deaf users.
“The requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act leave us no option but to deactivate some pages”
Excerpts from the home page of Avanti Hotel, Palm Springs
Lots of businesses, including market-leading brands, have caught up to the need of avoiding ADA violations. Still, commercial websites are vulnerable to lawsuits because of the ambiguity of the law.
There is no formal government standard to ensure ADA compliance. Due to technological evolutions, the accessibility framework provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) keeps updating.
Therefore, it can be said that the only way to steer clear of the risk of lawsuits is to attain a proactive approach and constantly perform audits with the help of website accessibility tools.
Background of ADA Accessibility Guidelines
The ADA (Americans with Disability Act) became a civil rights law in 1990, prohibiting discrimination based on disability. In 2010, the Department of Justice (DOJ) revised Title III of the ADA Act and provided standards to make technology accessible.
The W3C process published the first version of a stable and referenceable framework to ensure ADA compliance, called WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). The first version was published in 2008 as WCAG 2.0, with revised success criteria added in WCAG 2.1 in 2018. The WCAG 2.2 draft is almost finalized, and WCAG 3 is a working draft.
All these web accessibility resources are useful for businesses, web developers, and audit specialists. Adhering to the success criteria mentioned in WCAG ensures that the content is Perceivable, Operable, Robust, and Understandable.
In simple words, the content displayed on your business website, software platform, or mobile apps should be easy to navigate, understand, and access. Users should be able to access the content with just a keyboard, and those unable to use a keyboard should be able to navigate the displayed information via mouse or suitable hardware.
If there is a form to be filled out, disabled users should be able to do that. The contrast ratio should not trigger seizures, and there should be properly labeled images, content, and other elements that make accessibility barrier-free for disabled users.
What You Need to Know to Avoid Lawsuits in 2022
These ADA accessibility guidelines were meant to help businesses remediate websites that were full of barriers for disabled users. Still, the road to success is long, and ADA violations are increasing daily.
California tops the list for the highest number of lawsuits, followed closely by New York and Florida. Poor accessibility features are prominent, even on the home page for most businesses. Despite having browser extensions, accessibility issues are prevalent.
Perhaps accessibility is not yet a part of your workflow? To overcome the barriers, you need to understand the current accessibility guidelines, components, and barriers.
Components
Various components work together to meet the objectives of web accessibility, such as web browsers, media players, assistive technology, evaluation tools, and websites that incorporate text, images, sound, and the code that decides the structure.
All these components are interdependent. To achieve total accessibility, you need to focus on effectively implementing one component, as the rest will follow suit. For instance, if software for creating websites makes accessibility features easy to implement, the content is likely to be free from accessibility barriers.
If any of the components are weak, you need to perform accessibility audits and focus on addressing those accessibility barriers.
Use of technology by the federal government
Barriers
- Barriers in perceivability occur when information is conveyed with color only. A limited color palette can make things difficult for a color-blind user.
- Deaf users cannot access multimedia that lacks captions. The same applies to mobile accessibility barriers when users keep the sound off in public places.
- Without a browser extension or assistive technology, users cannot perceive non-text objects.
- Lack of sensitivity, poor hand-eye coordination, or partial paralysis can make text entry difficult.
- Mobile keypads are small, which makes text entry difficult.
- Auto-updating or blinking content makes reading difficult for users with cognitive disabilities.
Accessibility Guidelines
As discussed, the framework that governs Title III of the ADA is WCAG. Businesses need to focus on the current version, WCAG 2.1.
The success criteria of WCAG 2.0 are directly included in WCAG 2.1. The framework currently focuses on mobile accessibility barriers and challenges for people with low vision and cognitive disabilities. This implies that your commercial website should have simple layouts, enhanced contrast, easy navigations, text alternatives for non-text content, and audio descriptions or captions for media elements.
There are three levels of conformance to aim for accessibility guidelines:
- LEVEL A: Fulfills the basic requirements.
- LEVEL AA: Best suited for websites, covers most accessibility barriers.
- LEVEL AAA: Desired level, but almost unachievable for websites – Level AA usually suffices for a commercial website.
Key success criteria in WCAG 2.1 require:
- Web developers to design large prints, symbols, or simple language to provide non-text alternatives for the disabled.
- Captions for audio content and audio descriptions for video content.
- Simple layouts and meaningful structure to display content.
- Content to be easily displayed in both portrait and landscape orientation.
- Text and images to have a minimum contrast level of 4.5:1, with an enhanced contrast level of 7:1.
- Content to be accessible from the keyboard.
- Sufficient time for the user to read and understand the content.
- No data loss in case of re-authentication.
- Avoid flashing content more than thrice in a second, which may cause seizures.
- Pages to be navigable with organized titles, headings, and labels.
- Content to be readable, with provisions for determining the default human language.
- Provision of assistance to minimize user errors in case of input requirements.
Businesses are encouraged to aim for Level AA of WCAG 2.1 to adhere to the law. The proposed roadmap to accessibility might sound confusing, time-consuming, and probably overwhelming if you lack domain knowledge.
You can contact our auditing team, who are passionate about making web content easy to understand, read, and operate. The desired level of conformance to the success criteria can be achieved once you pay attention to accessibility barriers.
Click here to try out the free accessibility tool or speak with our accessibility specialists to target the barriers with a comprehensive website audit.