Guest Blogger: Avram Sand, Access Armada
Accessibility Isn’t Just Wheelchairs and Ramps
As business owners, you’re probably familiar with standard disability accommodations. New facilities must include accessible parking spaces, bathroom stalls, ramps, and handrails. But did you know that the web has its own accessibility requirements?
Federal courts have interpreted the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as applying to websites and mobile apps. And in the past year alone, many thousands of small businesses (including several portable storage providers) have been targeted by private lawsuits over inaccessible websites. Tens of thousands (if not more) settle out of court before any lawsuit is filed.
What does it mean for a website to be accessible?
What is Digital Accessibility?
Digital accessibility is the practice (and result) of making websites, mobile apps, PDFs, and any other digital interfaces easily navigable, understood, and functional for all users including those with disabilities. The most widely accepted blueprint and set of standards for doing this are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG is a project of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is an international group that sets standards for the entire web.
The WCAG guidelines help ensure that your site is built to be usable and perceivable by users with disabilities, including those that are blind or visually impaired, deaf or hard of hearing, or those that lack the fine motor control to navigate with a mouse. For example, your site should include the following:
- Captions or transcripts of video or audio (for deaf or hard of hearing users)
- Support screen reader software (used by many blind users) to have the site contents read aloud
- The entire site should be navigable using only a keyboard (for customers with a lack of fine motor control)
- Use zoom or text resize functions (for visually impaired users)
- Color combinations that are high enough contrast that they can be easily read by color blind or visually impaired customers
Why Should You Prioritize Accessibility?
We’ve already touched upon some of the legal contexts for accessibility and staying in compliance with the ADA. In addition, there are also state laws such as California’s Unruh Act and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that have their own digital accessibility considerations. Since portable and self-storage businesses have a physical location (or nexus), they are the most likely to be found liable in court and compelled to pay the plaintiff’s legal fees. But even if you can manage to prevail in court, the best defense is having an accessible website so that you can avoid being sued in the first place.
The Accessibility ROI
But the business case for accessibility isn’t just avoiding legal risk. Making your site more accessible means improving the user experience for all customers (including those who don’t have disabilities). And users with disabilities are a much larger population than you might realize.
Not all disabilities are permanent and most people can expect to experience disability at some point in their lives. For example, as the US population ages, there are a growing number of people with reduced vision, color perception, dexterity, and focus. Some estimates put the portion of the population with some disability as high as 20%!
Prioritizing this population when you design and build your site can result in higher engagement, more conversions, and ultimately more bookings and revenue. But if you don’t serve this user segment, you can be sure that one of your competitors will.
Accessibility Boosts SEO
Google’s August 2021 page experience update prioritizes better user experience as an important signal in ranking pages. There is evidence that strong accessibility features can contribute to making sites more usable. It’s not surprising that Google has already incorporated accessibility tests into its Lighthouse audit tool along with other usability metrics like page speed performance.
But even at the level of content relevance, there are specific accessibility requirements that can help improve your SEO rankings by making your site more readable by search engines. Thinking about page content from an accessibility perspective will ensure that you write informative page titles and headings. And coding the page structure for screen readers can also make it easier for search engine bots to digest the page. And while Google has made great advances in “seeing” and interpreting images and video, adding captions and alt text can still make it much easier for you to associate media with the keywords that you are targeting in your SEO efforts.
How to Make Your Website Accessible
The most cost-effective way to make your site accessible is to build it that way in the first place. If you are in the process of designing or building a new website, you should make sure to discuss your accessibility requirements with your designer, developer, or agency. But if you aren’t due for a redesign, there is still plenty that you can do.
As a first step, you can ask your website provider or agency what they have already done to make your site accessible and whether they feel comfortable helping you address any issues. You can also take advantage of free accessibility scanners like WAVE. While a tool like WAVE can only find about 25% of accessibility issues, it should give you a better sense of whether you should dig further.
Unfortunately, web accessibility is still not on the radar for most agencies and developers so you may need to bring in an accessibility consultant or expert to perform an audit on your site. This accessibility provider can identify and prioritize accessibility issues and work with your existing web provider to fix them.
Tax Credits Can Help Defray Your Costs
Accessibility is more affordable than you think! While addressing your site’s accessibility issues will require an investment, many businesses are eligible for the federal Disabled Access Credit. Each and every year, the federal government will write you a check to reimburse 50% of your accessibility spending (up to $5,000 annually). And since this tax credit can be claimed every year, delaying your accessibility work until next year is leaving money on the table. If you time it right, you may even be able to claim $10,000 for your project if it spreads over two calendar years.
We’ve written a more extensive post with all of the details around eligibility and how to claim the credit.
More Accessible is Better than Less
Your ultimate goal should be to achieve 100% accessibility compliance, but you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Every accessibility improvement makes your site a bit more usable. And it is possible to quickly target the issues that are most likely to reduce your risk of being targeted for a lawsuit.
Access Armada can help you find and prioritize the highest impact fixes to get the most improvement as quickly as possible. To get started, reach out to learn more about digital accessibility and conduct a free website review and strategy session.
Avram Sand is the founder and principal at Access Armada. Access Armada is a new type of digital accessibility agency, focusing on helping small to midsize businesses, nonprofits, and digital agencies achieve ADA compliance for websites, mobile apps, and anything digital. We offer comprehensive accessibility services so that you can check this one concern off your list and focus on what you do best.