Primarily, accessibility-related to websites is all about ensuring that the web pages are compliant with the regulations related to easy accessibility to people with disabilities. There are various laws regulating the accessibility requirements now. Many lawsuits are also being filed now in terms of accessibility compliance, even against Amazon, as you can see.
So, any website owners or administrators running a website in the public domain should consider accessibility a serious requirement. As of late, it is necessary to confirm compliance with the:
- Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973,
- American Disabilities Act 1990, and
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) by the W3C consortium.
Further, we will discuss some important aspects related to accessibility compliance for your websites.
AccessiBe accessibility compliance requirements
As AccessiBe specifies, many lawsuits are being filed by the public against businesses that are not offering accessible websites by being ADA compliant. The website owners are now hurrying to make their pages compliant with the accessibility requirements of Section 508 and other accessibility regulations, as we discussed above.
Along with the compliance needs, we can see that the Google search engine also specifies the need for accessibility as a ranking element. Many public information sites had to either shut down or had to redirect the traffic due to the accessibility issues on their pages. Many of them had also suffered huge penalties for noncompliance with ADA. For retail businesses and e-commerce stores, accessibility is a mandatory need in order to maintain the customer base.
What to consider for ensuring accessibility?
There are a lot of tools and strategies to ensure accessibility compliance for websites. As per the W3C guidelines, web accessibility is all about making the websites and applications be designed and developed in such a way that people of all kinds of disabilities can use them easily and quickly without any discrimination. In fact, web accessibility is a very broad term when it aims to incorporate the needs of people with various kinds of disabilities, including but not limited to visual, auditory, cognitive, neurological, and mental disabilities.
Laws related to accessibility
The US Federal Government passed the Rehabilitation Act in 1973, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in all the programs initiated by the Federal government. An amendment to this law was made through Section 508 later, the Rehabilitation Act, by adding the information technology sector under this law for federal employees and the public. Again in 1990, The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed by specifying the civil rights for prohibiting ay types of discrimination against disabled people.
So, if you are planning for a brick-and-mortar business space or a website to cater to your online customers, it is essential not to comply with the accessibility needs. There are various Titles under the 1990 ADA Act, which you need to study and make sure that you are fully compliant with the accessibility needs of people with disabilities by avoiding any discrimination. AccessiBe tools will help you ensure website accessibility and also go a step ahead to take your web content to a wider and prospective audience.