How Accessible is Your Website?

The ADA - Americans with Disabilities Act - is the law that requires business offer same services to all customers, regardless of physical limitation. Most business websites should be ADA compliant.

Over 20% of the world’s population suffers from some form of disability; resulting in millions of people struggling to access web pages. Considerations include:

• Inability to use a mouse
• Inability to view visual graphics
• Inability to hear audio
• Inability to focus on the web page details

General Guidelines

Perceivable - ability to see or hear the web content, using screen readers and other assistant technologies.
Operable - ability to operate the website using a range of input devices such as keyboard, mouse or input pens.
Understandable - ability to comprehend the website content by users with varying IQ levels.
Robust - ability for the website to be accessed using different technologies and equipment.

Some ADA Best Practices to Make Your Website more ADA Friendly

• Images - Ensure all images on your website have an alt tag text description.
• Documents - If you are posting documents, use Adobe, since PDF documents are screen reader compliant (if in text format).
• Design - Stick to universal web friendly font sizes, and colors … as well as font typeface. Avoid the extreme avant-garde.
• Multi-media Content - If your site uses video content, be sure to include text transcriptions.

This is just a quick introductory overview of ADA compliance to offer information about website accessibility options.

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