Technology

ADA Compliant Fine And How to Avoid It

Editor

Digital content tends to be ubiquitous, but it is not universally accessible. In the modern world, compliance with the requirements indicated in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are critical.

 

Although it is clear that the accessibility of digital documents is a crucial issue for contemporary companies, many companies come up against the specifics of this concept and get Ada’s website fine.

How to Make Your Document Accessible, And Why Is It an Important Consideration

Accessibility is a simple concept but difficult to implement. It essentially refers to the idea of ensuring that your content is accessible to everyone, including the disabled. One in four Americans has some type of disability (cognitive or mobility issues are the most common), so if your content isn’t universally accessible, you could be shutting out a large chunk of your potential audience.

 

An accessible digital document must take into account each type of potential disability. For example, vision-impaired readers may need to use magnification tools; deaf and hard-of-hearing public members will need to view captions on any media component of your website; people with mobility issues may prefer to use keyboard shortcuts for content navigation. These are just a few common instances where companies may fail to meet ADA compliance with their content. Inaccessible content not only poses a problem because it doesn’t meet legal requirements, but it also ostracizes a potential subset of customers.

How Can Companies Ensure The Accessibility of Their Publications?

Probably, the easiest way to ensure you have ADA compliant website is to work with a platform like Adafines.com that has already established a system for creating ADA-compliant content. While they can ease much of the accessibility burden on you, there are some steps you can still take yourself during the content creation process to ensure your digital documents are accessible. For example, text cannot be encoded within images because the screen reader software can’t decipher this information.

What Can Companies Do to Improve Content Accessibility From the Outset?

Some of the simplest ways businesses can improve the accessibility of their assets include:

  • Avoid using images or audio solely to convey information: background noises to create an atmosphere are fine. Photos that help set the tone of the document are encouraged, but an audio explanation of a product or a photography tutorial without captions is not very accessible.

  • Only use video with captions: Fortunately, captioning technology is quite advanced (and often automatic when turned on), so it’s not difficult to meet this requirement.

  • Beware of colour combinations: There are certain colours that should be avoided (especially text and background) in order to comply with colour blindness requirements.

  • Keep text away from images: As mentioned, text embedded in images cannot be read by screenreader software, even in offline, accessible document versions, so information such as captions should be kept separate from photos.

  • By taking small steps like these during the creation process, it will be much easier to stay compliant when creating your web pages.

 

Adafines believes in providing everyone with access to quality content, which is why we have made it easy to avoid the ADA website fine and improve everything in the shortest time.