When organizations think of becoming compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), they often think about wheelchair ramps and handrails. But those living with disabilities need access to information as well, which is why there are now guidelines for creating websites that can be accessed by everyone.
Here are some of the ways the team at IlluminAge works to ensure that all of our websites are ADA compliant – something particularly important for companies whose audience includes seniors and people living with disabilities.
Images
Screen readers and Braille displays are two of the technologies that allow people with visual impairment to be able to use the Internet. But neither device can interpret photographs or other images. So in order to make images work for these devices, you need to add a text equivalent – called an alt tag – to all images. Alt tags should be descriptive of the photo content and not the page’s content, and not something like “picture-1.” Today’s best practice is to add alt tags to all images – from your website background, to home page sliders, to photos used in each page – as a best practice. Our preferred platform is WordPress, which plans to make alt tags required in a future upgrade. We are looking forward to this, as it will ensure that anyone who updates their site stays in compliance.
PDFs
As with images, PDFs are often not accessible via screen readers, so best practice for accessibility would be to move content out of your PDF and into an HTML web page. The web page is much easier for an assistive device to read. If you do use a PDF, be sure that it is converted to PDF as text and not a scanned document. Scanned documents turn your text into images, which are unreadable by assistive devices.
Color and font sizes
People with low vision may need high-contrast color settings in order to see what’s on their screen. And their requirements may differ – for instance, some people may be able to better see light-colored text on a black background, and others black text on a white background. Users need to be able to manipulate these choices in their browsers, so your design needs to ensure that this is possible. You should also include a text size option on your website to allow people to choose a size they can read easily.
Video
In order for people with hearing loss to be able to experience videos, closed captioning is the best practice for ADA compliance. YouTube is currently doing this to videos uploaded to their site. For example, our client, The Alden Network, has closed captioning on their YouTube page.
Navigation
IlluminAge includes a “skip to navigation” link so that visitors with screen readers do not have to move through unnecessary features or graphics they can’t use before accessing page content. This allows for easy keyboard navigation of the site.
Best practices for ADA compliance, much like best practices in design and development for search engines, may change over time as technology changes and styles and preferences of website visitors change. As a rule of thumb, IlluminAge recommends a complete redesign and redevelopment of your website every three years to stay up to date with current standards.
If you’re interested in ADA compliance for your website, we would be happy to do a review for best practices and make recommendations for improvements. Contact us for a quote.