Accessibility 101 for Dummies: ADA Compliance Training

For visually impaired users that don’t have the benefit of visual cues, navigating a site and finding the information they want takes longer. An average user of your website might click a link and go to a new webpage. They scan that page and find it isn’t what they were looking for and so they go back to the previous webpage – all in a matter of seconds. For screen reader users, this hiccup takes minutes.

Thinking about accessibility realizes benefits for all users. When the process to order food delivery or book an appointment, is intuitive, more people will use and return to your site to give you their business. This means more conversions.

Be Accessible provides webinars, half-day and full-day sessions for accessibility training for audiences, technical and non-technical. The following video is a brief example of what we may cover:

Accessibility is dynamic, not brittle. It’s about expecting user behavior and providing clear, intuitive navigation on your website.

We know code. We know design. Our developers find the most meaningful issues on your site and prioritize them in terms of cost to fix and impact to the general user base.

Now, you can make your website accessible or be sued first, and forced to do it on a shorter, more expensive timeline. Be Accessible believes that integrating accessibility must be a manageable, sustainable process.

How web accessibility benefits business owners

If you are a business owner, you may be familiar with the term bounce rate. The bounce rate of a website is the rate of how long users stay on a website. Unlike conversion rates that we want to be high, our goal is to have a lower bounce rate. The lower the bounce rate, the longer people are staying on the website. 

On the contrary, a higher bounce rate indicates a poorly constructed site. A website that lacks accessibility would be considered a poorly constructed site. A poorly constructed website includes things like non-responsive design, lack of color contrast, and missing form labels.

Our goal is to keep people on our website longer so that they discover more reasons why they should choose us over our competitors. A study found that 71% of disabled web users will leave a website when it is not accessible. This is a large enough percentage to have a significant impact against the overall bounce rate. Business owners must prioritize web accessibility to avoid potential loss of customers.

How web accessibility benefits developers and Google

If your web developer argues that web accessibility does not benefit them, then it may be time to find a new developer as it is just undeniable how vital web accessibility for developers is, especially nowadays. Developers aim to create high quality websites and know that the cleaner the code is, the faster their websites will run. If a website’s load time is slow or a website fails to rank high in search results, the development team is responsible. Cleaner code means faster, high quality code. Semantically correct code is cleaner code. Accessible code is semantically correct. This means that code is written according to specifications. HTML elements (code) have semantic meaning. Developers optimize a website’s accessibility and performance by using code as it is intended. 

Aside from having fewer bugs and making a website load faster, semantic code also helps search engines such as Google and Bing to index the content and achieve higher search rankings. For example, let’s say that a web page is about comparing web development platforms such as WordPress and Shopify. The page visually uses headings to organize its content. The code of the page uses paragraph tags with classes (used for targeting styles) to create the visual appearance of headings like this:  

Be Accessible provides you with a regular testing policy, a workflow for resolving issues, a point of contact for users to raise accessibility issues, and an accessibility statement, to be publicly posted. Altogether, your business develops an accessibility program that satisfies courts and makes your company part of an Internet that serves everyone.

We’re based in Los Angeles. We love what we do.