The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted just over 30 years ago to protect the rights of those with disabilities, prohibiting discrimination in public services, employment, and telecommunications. On January 1, 2018 ADA regulations state that your organization’s website must be ADA compliant.
Is my site ADA compliant?
While it may be difficult to be 100% compliant, there are steps you can take to ensure your site is ADA compliant. Here are just a few of the requirements to make your site compliant;
- Make sure images had descriptive tags
- All video and audio have a text transcript
- All video has closed captioning
- Present content in a meaningful order
- When providing instructions, make sure they aren’t reliant on a single sensory
- Color contrast ratio must be between 4.5:1 on all text and background
- All functions must be accessible by keyboard
- Any content that blinks, pauses, or moves must have the ability to stop or pause
- Each page must have a unique descriptive page title
- Navigation layout must be consistent though the site
What’s the Risk?
While there are no current legal prescriptions for web accessibility for private entities, WCAG 2.0 AA is frequently referenced by courts.
- In 2015 MIT and Harvard settled a claim for $1.5 million after 4 deaf and hard of hearing students filed suites against the schools stating the website didn’t caption online content.
- In 2012 Netflix settled a claim for $755,000 after The National Association of the Deaf claimed that the site did not provide equal access to its “Watch Instantly” streaming content, as there had previously been a “refusal” by the company to provide closed captions.
- In 2019 a case made it all the way to the Supreme Court involving Domino’s. Guillermo Robles, who is legally blind, sued the company after failing to order pizza via the site and app, despite using screen-reading software.
” A full list can be found here, at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You can also check your site here.
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