The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) Website Compliance

Your customers and users want to know that you are doing something about your inaccessible web pages. Publish any steps that you’ve taken and any steps you’re committed to doing in the future. This is the place to show that real progress is being made. For example, the White House published a straightforward accessibility statement including ways users can contact them with improvements.

It’s no surprise that accessibility takes real teamwork! It can’t be done alone. Every employee in your organization—from the C-suite to entry-level reps—has a role to play in making your product useful and usable for all.

• Leadership: Focuses on how this fits into the business model (business opportunities and legal risk)
• Customer service: Triages accessibility complaints and acts as the first line of defense
• Software developers and designers: Designs and develops the consumer-facing product
• Procurement/third-party contractors: Acts as an extension of the brand and executes work on behalf of your business
• Content contributors: Produces public-facing content, including emails, newsletters, blog, landing pages, social media posts, PDFs, etc.

Looking for comprehensive team training? Explore on-demand courses or request instructor-led training.

Once you’ve made a commitment and identified your key players, it’s time to make accessibility stick! This includes communicating goals and benchmarks within the organization. Determining a reporting process and cadence will keep people accountable and inspire them to get the work done. A tool that automatically checks the accessibility status on your site can be exceptionally helpful. After all, who doesn’t love a good compliance dashboard?

Finding partners that support website accessibility will set your brand up for success—and prevent unwanted legal risk—in the long run. This is definitely easier to orchestrate with brand-new vendors, but it’s never too late to ask for partners to implement best practices.

Here are a few ways to hold your vendors and partners to conformance guidelines:

• Require reports, website testing, ongoing results, and proof of improvement
• Include a standard in your contract for remediation: “If something isn’t accessible, it is your job to remediate it.”
• Include consequences/penalties: “We will cancel the contract if the final product is not accessible.”

Once you’ve set out your policy, established key stakeholders, and created benchmarks, now the real fun begins. If you don’t have a plan for testing and measurement in place, you probably won’t make real progress on your ADA compliance goals.

“You can’t 100% rely on automation—manual and user testing is key.”

Yes, automation is your friend! While running comprehensive audits, we’ve found that 57% of fixes are identified by axe-core automation. Go forth and run it, resolve it, and set requirements. But you can’t forget about manual user testing along the way.