ADA Laws Require Your Website To Be Accessible

Be Accessible Inc. supports websites that need to engage the broadest circle of people. We believe online services can be open to all and empower those with disabilities. We help organizations meet website accessibility standards that are complex and evolving.

Accessibility laws, such as the ADA and Section 508, increasingly apply to websites, treating them as places of public accommodation–that must be inclusive to those with visual, hearing, and motor disabilities.

More than 1,000 web accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2017.

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 ignores the importance of accessibility and lacks necessary elements 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 Inc. provides your company with a 3 Step Solution that doesn’t just give you a list of accessibility errors but a roadmap to fixing website issues and compliance. We’re adept in working with developers or executives, technical or non-technical staff. Moreover, we use a combination of automated tools and our own experienced auditors to inspect your website. We then coordinate a group of visually impaired people to test and navigate your site.

Besides the full audit and recommended fixes, we also provide training to avoid future issues, information on your present legal exposure, and above all, a face-to-face relationship with Be Accessible Inc.

Get ahead of legal risk and broaden the circle that can benefit from your product. We’d like to help.