How To Test Your Website For ADA Compliance?
The ADA Act protects the civil rights of the disabled population. The law ensures that people with disabilities can access information and communication technology products with ease. This means ADA website testing is necessary for businesses. Testing confirms that the contrast levels or the font choices of your business website are not causing accessibility barriers for those with visual impairments. Likewise, such tests recognize any broken links, missing alt texts, or other aspects that restrict the website from being easily operable and accessible. ADA website test results help to identify the pitfalls that can adversely affect your business. Read on to know about the methods and procedures involved in making your business website ADA compliant.
What are the benefits of an ADA Compliant Website Test?
ADA testing adheres to the recommendations mentioned in the WCAG (Web Content Accessible Guidelines) created by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The guidelines include different criteria for making the content of a business website easily operable for those with disabilities. The accessibility criteria are released in varied versions, such as WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1. Testing a website for ADA compliance ensures that your business conforms to the guidelines created by The W3C. It is beneficial for all sizes of businesses to invest in ADA compliance testing.
- Commercial websites must adhere to ADA regulations. Failure to do that results in expensive lawsuits.
- When a company fails to meet the ADA guidelines, it affects its credibility among the competition and can impact its SEO rankings because the Google algorithm “punishes” non-accessible websites.
- ADA testing leads to a fully accessible website for people with physical, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. It increases the size of the target segment and indeed enhances the reach of a business.
To protect your business from litigation and to maximize your reach to potential customers, getting your website tested according to the latest ADA guidelines is essential.
How to test a website for ADA compliance?
Commercial websites can be made accessible in one of two ways:
ONE: Find suitable software to conduct the ADA testing.
TWO: Hire accessibility experts to conduct manual audits, where trained technicians test each page for all requirements, including the compatibility of the website with multiple screen readers and browsers as well both mobile and desktop testing.
Ideally, a combination of both these methods is suitable to build an accessible website.
Using automated software can offer quick results. However, the accuracy of such software scans is quite low. The underlying reason is that no set of codes can interpret human emotions with sufficient accuracy. It has been proven that WCAG issues can be addressed with only 30% accuracy through software testing. Therefore, human involvement is required for accurate results. Manual audits can identify the problem areas related to neurological disabilities that are often missed during software testing – AI solutions can only get us so far.
Automated tools can be used to check missing alt text for images. It is a key element for the seamless functioning of screen readers. But that doesn’t mean your website becomes fully accessible. Pages created using a template do not necessarily require manual audits. However, accessibility standards for pages with unique elements can only be assured via manual auditing. In addition to this, manual audits offer proactive recommendations for issues like varied browser extensions.
Bottom line
ADA compliance testing is crucial for the success of a business. If your business has a digital presence, it is important to have a website accessible for all. In case your commercial website lacks the operability and accessibility standards mentioned in the latest release of WCAG, get in touch with the accessibility experts that offer a combined solution of automated testing and manual audits. For more information, visit the link given below.
