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When you are beginning to consider building a new website or updating an existing one, talking about how you will make your website more accessible is an important conversation you should be having. Web accessibility standards aren't just a legal requirement today — they're crucial to building a user-friendly and inclusive website.
ADA compliance ensures that people of all abilities can navigate and interact with your site. Beyond avoiding potential lawsuits, making your website accessible broadens your audience, improves SEO and strengthens your brand’s reputation. In this post, we’ll explore the importance of ADA-compliant web design and provide practical steps to ensure your website meets these standards.
What Is Ada Compliance In Web Design?
ADA compliance refers to the practice of ensuring your website adheres to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which mandates that digital platforms be accessible to all including individuals with disabilities. This extends beyond physical spaces into the digital realm, meaning your website must accommodate users who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers, voice navigation and keyboard-only navigation.
Failing to meet these guidelines can result in lawsuits and penalties, not to mention alienating a large segment of your audience. Ensuring your website is accessible protects you from legal risks while fostering inclusivity and enhancing user experience.
Key Principles Of Accessible Web Design
To create an accessible website, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have laid out four main principles website designers and developers need to follow. Those principles are that your site should be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.
These principles ensure that websites are functional for people with a wide range of disabilities because, as of 2021, around 13.5% of the U.S. population (42.5M people) live with some type of disability. This can include those living with both easily identifiable conditions like many motor impairments and unseen conditions such as varying degrees of color blindness, auditory impairments that may affect certain frequencies or volumes and learning disabilities like dyslexia.
Designing a website for everyone requires careful consideration to ensure inclusivity. By addressing these diverse needs, websites become more accessible and user-friendly for everyone, regardless of ability.
To better understand what these four principles cover, here’s the breakdown.
Perceivable
Your website’s content must be presented in a way that all users, regardless of their abilities, can understand and interact with. This includes ensuring that visual, auditory and other sensory information is accessible to everyone. Examples include:
Text Alternatives for Non-Text Content: Provide alt text for images, captions for videos and transcripts for audio files. For instance, an image of a customer interacting with your product should include alt text describing what’s happening.
Adaptable Content: Allow users to customize how they perceive content. This could include enabling users to adjust font size or contrast or providing options for viewing content in simplified or magnified formats.
Distinguishable Design: Ensure content is easy to distinguish. For example, sufficient contrast between text and background colors helps users with low vision or color blindness to read your content.
Operable
Every user should be able to interact with your website’s features. Whether through a keyboard, mouse or assistive technology, your site must be designed to accommodate a wide range of inputs and actions. Examples include:
Keyboard Accessibility: All interactive elements, such as forms, buttons and menus, must be fully navigable via keyboard commands. This is essential for users who cannot use a mouse due to mobility impairments.
Navigable Structure: A logical, easy-to-follow structure helps users find and interact with your content. Features like clear headers, skip navigation links and descriptive page titles allow users to efficiently move through the site.
Adequate Time: Ensure that interactive content (such as timed quizzes or purchase windows) gives users enough time to respond. Alternatively, offer controls to pause or extend timed interactions.
Understandable
A website should be intuitive and predictable. This means creating content and navigation that are clear, straightforward and easy for users to follow, ensuring a positive experience for all visitors. Examples include:
Readable Content: Use simple, clear language and provide definitions for any industry-specific jargon or abbreviations. This helps all users, including those with cognitive impairments, to follow along.
Predictable Navigation: Keep navigation consistent across the site. Avoid unexpected changes in page layout or functionality, as these can confuse users. For example, if clicking a logo on one page takes a user to the homepage, it should behave the same way on all pages.
Input Assistance: Offer guidance for completing forms, such as automatically identifying errors or providing suggestions. For instance, if a user enters an invalid email address, provide a clear error message explaining what went wrong and how to fix it.
Robust
Your website must work reliably across different platforms and devices, both now and in the future. This requires adhering to modern coding standards to ensure compatibility with current and emerging assistive technologies. Examples include:
Compatible with Assistive Tools: Your website should be compatible with screen readers, voice control software and other assistive technologies. This requires adhering to proper coding standards (like using HTML5 for semantic structure) to ensure these tools can interpret the content accurately.
Resilience to Updates: As browsers and technologies evolve, your website should remain accessible. Regularly audit your site’s functionality across multiple platforms and devices to identify any issues caused by updates.
By following these four principles—perceivable, operable, understandable and robust—you can ensure that your website provides a seamless, accessible experience for all users. These principles not only help individuals with disabilities but also create a more intuitive, user-friendly experience for everyone.
How To Check If Your Website Is Ada Compliant
Ensuring that your website meets accessibility standards is a critical first step toward making your site more inclusive. Fortunately, there are several tools and methods you can use to evaluate the accessibility of your site. Here's how to get started:
Use Automated Web Accessibility Testing Tools
Automated tools can quickly scan your website for potential accessibility issues. These tools provide a detailed report on areas that may need improvement. Some popular tools include:
WAVE: A free tool that identifies accessibility errors, such as missing alt text or low contrast, directly on your website.
axe: A comprehensive accessibility testing tool that integrates with browsers and development environments to provide in-depth feedback.
Lighthouse: A Chrome browser tool that runs audits on web performance, including accessibility and provides improvement suggestions.
Conduct Manual Testing
Automated tools are helpful, but they can't catch every issue. Performing manual tests will help ensure your site is truly accessible. Here are a few ways to do this:
Keyboard Navigation Test: Try navigating your site using only your keyboard (using the Tab key, Enter, and Spacebar). Ensure that all interactive elements, like forms, buttons and links, are easily reachable and that the focus order makes sense.
Screen Reader Testing: Screen readers, such as NVDA (free) or JAWS, simulate how visually impaired users experience your website. Listening to your content as it's read aloud by a screen reader can help you identify any confusing elements or missing descriptive content.
Color Contrast Check: Many tools, such as Contrast Checker, help ensure your text has enough contrast with the background to be legible for users with low vision or color blindness.
Review The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (Wcag)
The WCAG provides a comprehensive set of guidelines for making web content more accessible. You can use the WCAG as a checklist to ensure your website adheres to the latest standards. The guidelines are categorized by three levels of conformance:
A: Basic accessibility requirements are being met.
AA: This is a more comprehensive accessibility level and is the most common for well executed websites. At Swanson Russell, we are always setting out to achieve a AA level of accessibility with every website we develop and design.
AAA: This is the highest and most complex level of accessibility as outlined by the WCAG. While it can be beneficial to have this level of compliance, it is typically not mandatory. In many instances, achieving and maintaining this level of accessibility is quite difficult. Unless absolutely required, AA compliance is a good mark to set out to achieve.
Get User Feedback
One of the best ways to ensure your website is accessible is to ask real users with disabilities to test your site. They can provide invaluable insight on usability and point out any barriers that automated tools might miss. Consider reaching out to advocacy groups or user testing services that specialize in accessibility.
By combining these tools and methods, you can gain a clear understanding of your website's accessibility and take the necessary steps to improve it. Regular audits and updates are key to maintaining compliance and ensuring that your website remains accessible for all users.
Why Ada Compliance Is Good For Business
Designing an ADA-compliant website isn't just about following legal mandates, it can offer tangible business benefits. You want a website that tells visitors what you can do for them, but if the website is hard to navigate for all, you’re going to miss opportunities. Here are just a few ways that investing in accessibility can help grow your business.
You Can Reach A Broader Audience
According to the CDC, 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. lives with some form of disability. By ensuring your website is accessible, you can tap into a large, often underserved, market. From individuals with visual impairments to those with mobility challenges, making your site accessible ensures that more people can interact with your brand, leading to a larger potential customer base.
It Boosts User Experience For All Visitors
Many features of accessible design, such as clear navigation, simplified forms and alt text for images, enhance the overall usability of your website for all visitors. For example, keyboard-friendly navigation isn't just beneficial to people with disabilities - it also helps power users who prefer quick shortcuts. A well-organized, easy-to-navigate site keeps users engaged longer and encourages repeat visits.
Accessibility Can Play A Role In Improving Seo
While SEO and web accessibility are two distinct areas in the development and maintenance of a website, certain improvements in accessibility could also enhance your search engine optimization efforts in the long run. Two solutions may include:
Alt Text on images provides context for screen readers but can also help search engines better understand your content.
Structured HTML helps assistive technologies interpret the page's structure while also allowing search engines to crawl your site more effectively.
That said, a fully accessible website doesn't guarantee high search rankings. True SEO requires focused keyword strategies, well-optimized content and implementing good technical SEO practices. However, building an accessible site often lays the groundwork for a more optimized, user-friendly experience.
Legal Protection And Risk Mitigation
Non-compliance with ADA regulations can expose your business to legal risks including lawsuits, fines and settlements. In recent years, there's been a significant rise in website accessibility lawsuits, particularly targeting businesses whose sites are not easily navigable by people with disabilities. Ensuring your site meets accessibility standards protects your business from these risks, saving you costly legal expenses down the road.
Strengthen Brand Reputation And Trust
Consumers are increasingly loyal to brands that demonstrate inclusivity and social responsibility. A commitment to accessibility shows that your business cares about providing an inclusive experience for all users, not just those without disabilities. This can build trust with your audience, enhance your brand's reputation and create positive word-of-mouth, positioning your business as forward-thinking and customer-centric.
Accessible Website Projects We’ve Worked On
At Swanson Russell, we take pride in working with our clients to design and build websites that adhere to AA compliance, making it easier for individuals of all abilities to engage with our clients’ brands. Here are a few examples of websites we've recently designed or built that ensured these compliance standards were met:
E-Commerce Overhaul For Badlands
We worked with Badlands Gear to redesign their entire digital shopping experience, focusing not just on improving the shopping experience, but improving how users were able to shop easily no matter what. By optimizing for screen readers, improving keyboard navigation and making visual adjustments like enhanced color contrast, we helped ensure their site will be accessible to all users.
These efforts not only ensured a seamless shopping experience but also drove higher user engagement (+61% increase in Adds to Cart) and conversions (+8% Conversion Rate).
Brand Update With Cushman
As part of Cushman's brand update, our work ensured the website was not only ADA-compliant but also tailored to its unique audiences. This included designing features like audience toggling and a vehicle builder to simplify the process of finding the right vehicle without having to take unnecessary clicks or on-page actions that could impact a user using accessibility tools.
Additionally, the rebrand process included our UX/UI teams helping find and match new brand colors and fonts to ADA-friendly, web-safe options, which help to meet accessibility requirements without compromising the brand’s bold, refreshed identity.
Website & Campaign Refresh For Nebraska Game & Parks
Ahead of our Beneath Nebraska Skies advertising campaign, we worked with the Nebraska Game & Parks Commission to design a new, ADA-compliant website for the first time in nearly a decade. This redesign focused on making it easier for outdoor enthusiasts to explore the state's 75 parks by improving site navigation, adding new mapping features and updating the capabilities of users to quickly find resources, purchase permits and reserve campgrounds all within just a few clicks.
Designing a website with accessibility in mind is about more than just following the rules—it's about creating an inclusive experience for all users. By focusing on ADA compliance, you not only protect your business from legal risks but also demonstrate your commitment to serving every visitor who comes to your site.
