When you think of accessibility in the business world, what do you think of? Closed captioning, adaptive office furniture or wheelchair ramps may come to mind. What might not come to mind so readily is the internet—but the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations apply to the online world as well.
What accessibility means today is the result of decades of lobbying and campaigning by disability rights activists. The ADA, signed into law in 1990, prohibits discrimination based on disability. After it was passed, the Easter Seals used a poster that read, “It took an act of congress to order this pizza,” explaining that before 1990, people with hearing impairments were unable to communicate via phone with anyone whose phone was not specially equipped to receive their calls. The ADA required telecommunication companies to provide relay services to make their service accessible to people with disabilities.
The internet was in its infancy in 1990. As it grew, people with disabilities were understandably frustrated when they were unable to access the content like everyone else. Eventually, courts ruled that websites and apps are “places of public accommodation” and as such, must be accessible to all people.
Making sure your website is accessible is not only complying with the ADA, but also good for business. Without accessibility tools, your website acts as a digital sign reading “not welcome here” to people with disabilities.
Was your grilled cheese—er, website—built correctly?
IlluminAge’s lead developer, Elly Cabral, helps ensure that our clients’ websites are up to date with the most recent accessibility standards. These standards are developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community with the goal of ensuring the long-term growth of the web. W3C regularly updates these standards. If your site is two or three years old, it’s likely time for a refresh.
To start, your website should have a high-contrast tool, a font sizer tool, the ability to navigate with a keyboard, and alternative text for images. “That will get you 80% of the way toward full accessibility,” says Elly. What remains are coding and text elements that can be built into your site to ensure it’s fully accessible. And, she explains, it’s best to build these things into your site from the start.
Elly compares it to a poorly prepared grilled cheese sandwich. “You can tell if the cook buttered the bread after they grilled it, instead of before,” she says. “The ingredients are all there, but it’s just not quite right.” And sometimes, trying to address accessibility issues after a site is built ends up making the fix worse than the problem. Disability activists have accused some quick-fix accessibility vendors of making their access worse and interrupting the screen readers that allow them to listen to a site’s content. Accessibility is more than just a technical patch to shield a business from legal exposure. You want a site designed and developed with all users in mind. And some companies using these quick fixes end up in legal trouble anyway. Last July the New York Times reported that more than 400 business were sued in 2021 despite having these supposedly ADA-compliant widgets or overlays.
A website that is out of compliance with the ADA can have serious consequences. Domino’s Pizza took an accessibility lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court and lost, eventually settling with a customer who was unable to use their site or mobile app to order pizza using his accessibility tools. And that was in 2019, before the pandemic forced even more activities of everyday living onto the internet.
Free ADA compliance assessment
At IlluminAge we’re eager to help make the web a welcoming place for people of all abilities. If it’s been a while since your site was updated, contact us for a free ADA compliance assessment.