Is Your Website ADA Compliant?

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that reasonable accommodations be made so that disabled persons can access the same services that are accessible to clients without disabilities. Electronic services, including the Web, fall under these guidelines. As the Internet becomes more and more important in everyday life, for everything from banking to bill paying to making hotel reservations, it’s more necessary than ever that your website be accessible to everyone.

Poorly designed websites can create unnecessary barriers for people with disabilities, just as poorly designed buildings prevent some from entering. Designers may not realize how simple features built into a web page will assist someone.

Though there can be legal ramifications for not providing an accessible website, there several other good reasons for doing so:

• It opens your business or organization to more potential clients; it’s estimated that more than 6.8% of the population age 15 or older, and 21.3% age 65 and older, have sight and hearing impairments that can affect the quality of their Web experience — can you afford to lose that traffic to more accessible sites?
• It can limit your liability in the event of a civil lawsuit
• It improves search engine optimization by bringing your website into web standards compliance, increasing the amount of traffic search engines send to your site
• It improves the navigation and usability of your site for all users including those using older computers or those with slow internet connections
• It improves time on site and conversions as there is less site abandonment

We can help you make your website more accessible.

When accessible features are built into web pages, websites are more convenient and more available to everyone – including users with disabilities.

NMC can provide a complete audit of your website based on the only accessibility checklist approved by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. We will provide you with a document showing what pages have accessibility issues and what the issues are, basically a roadmap to bring your site into compliance.

If you feel more comfortable having NMC make the recommended edits to your site, we offer that service as well. And, if the issues are found to be difficult to solve given the age or structure of your site, we can make recommendations for an affordable site rebuild to bring your site into compliance with current Web standards.