Best Practices for ADA Website Accessibility Documentation
What to Record
You must be aware of the information your documentation needs to contain to ensure that your ADA website accessibility compliance documents are comprehensive.
Documentation requirements for many compliance issues are outlined in law or great detail by government organizations. Unfortunately, web accessibility does not follow this pattern.
What you’ll need for ADA website accessibility compliance documentation, however, can be determined by the compliance documents required in other situations.
The following should be included in your accessibility documentation at a minimum, and more materials may be useful depending on your organization’s requirements.
- Policies: Expectations, guidelines, and criteria for web accessibility should all be specified in writing.
- Training: It’s important to keep track of all manuals, dates, sessions, instructors, and participants.
- Updates: Keep track of when and how policies and assets are modified.
- Audits: Maintain records of any auditing techniques and software used to check for web accessibility.
- Staff: These documents should contain the current names of everyone who is in charge of online accessibility maintenance and training.
Problems and solutions: It’s important to have a detailed record of any website accessibility-related complaints or findings, as well as the steps taken to report and address them.
Organize your policies
Documentation, particularly that which is required for employee reference, such as policies, is useless unless it’s easy to locate. Make sure they are simple to find using a file sharing system, and ensure that all staff and new hires are aware of its location.
A shared hard drive, a file-sharing program like Google Docs, or a shared document storage platform like Dropbox might all be used as examples. Whatever you choose, make sure your staff is aware of when it is updated and where to locate the most recent copy.
Future upgrades won’t be helpful if all of your staff are still using outdated versions of the documentation. A clear file naming standard should be used to ensure that these are well-organized, so employees won’t have to waste time looking for what they need.
Simple to Read and Comprehend
Complexity is not a sign of quality when it comes to web accessibility documentation that your staff must use and comprehend. Regardless of a person’s level of technical understanding, your policies should make sense to them.
For instance, it makes no sense to require someone to learn computer languages if they merely provide words and photographs to the blog area of your website.
Use plain English, and wherever you can, stay away from jargon.
Provide specific instructions on what an employee may do and whom they may contact with any questions regarding the policies.
Reliable and current
Technology advances quickly. This is a particularly crucial step in your documentation process because outdated or incorrect website accessibility policies are typically useless.
If not, all of your previous efforts to create high-quality papers and procedures would be in vain.
Some of your website’s or technology’s accessibility policies will need to be replaced as they become outdated. You should have a procedure in place for updating your technology, as well as accessibility guidelines and general ADA website compliance papers.
For the staff to know when to check the policies for updates, they will also need to be aware of when these modifications are made.
Training on ADA Website Accessibility for All Team Members
It takes a variety of abilities to make a website accessible. Not every member of your staff needs to be fully knowledgeable about online accessibility. Each person, however, should be aware of how to maintain accessibility for the typical tools they use.
Because of this, we’ve organized our ADA website accessibility training into sections depending on the kinds of duties that certain members of your team are most likely to encounter.
Why is Web Accessibility Important for Everyone?
Everyone on your team—web designers, blog writers, programmers, and videographers—will be more likely to maintain web accessibility if they comprehend its significance.
Here are a few things to stress at the start of your ADA website accessibility training so that everyone is aware of the significance of web accessibility.
Websites provide a user-friendly virtual environment when leaving your home is difficult or impossible, but only if the website is accessible. Everyone can access the internet equally thanks to web accessibility.
All users may navigate websites more simply on smaller screens, use voice search, and magnifying screens.
This helps both abled and impaired users in circumstances where it’s more challenging to browse a website conventionally, such as on a rough bus. A business runs the danger of being sued if it does not physically accommodate all customers.
The same is true for websites; numerous lawsuits have been brought against companies that have unreachable websites.
Make Accessibility Rules and Procedures Readily Available
To ensure that everyone is on the same page, online accessibility rules and procedures should be accessible to everyone on your team.
For staff members to feel comfortable contacting their technical expert or accessibility specialist with questions, it’s also useful to include contact information.
Last but not least, a list of hyperlinks to useful sites, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), might be useful for addressing queries.
3 Key Areas to be Aware Of
Alt-Text and formatting for authors and photographers
Any staff employees who might include text, photographs, videos, or sound bites on the website should be familiar with the best practices for adding these elements. Extending this training to others who might deal with the site in the future in addition to those who already do is a smart idea.
It might be helpful to print out an ADA website accessibility checklist because some of these details are simple to forget.
Images should have alternative text (alt-text). The alt-text for the image should accurately and succinctly explain it. When adding photographs, be sure to show how to do it using your CMS.
The format is rational. To separate text into sections, headings and appropriate header formatting (H1, H2, H3, etc.) should be utilized. Instead of using bold, italics, and underlining to format headings, employ them where they’re needed in the text.
Links are obvious. The destination of a link should be clearly stated in the link text.
Clear color contrast is present.
Surprisingly, this is the most common web accessibility issue. There should be at least a 4:1 color contrast between text and backgrounds. Usually, this will already be included in the styles and layouts of the website. Use accessibility testing tools like a contrast checker before making any color changes from the defaults.
For videographers: controls and closed captions
Videos are growing more and more significant on the global web. As a result, creating accessible videos is crucial to your ADA website accessibility training. All team members who produce, edit, and post videos ought to be familiar with these components.
Closed captions are used in videos. Videos may be interpreted in this way even without sound. This is a good strategy for everyone, as deaf persons cannot utilize sound and many mobile users don’t.
The playing of audio and video isn’t automated. When content plays without a command, it disturbs consumers in general and screen reader users specifically.
There should be a stop button on these controls as well.
The video flashes no more frequently than three times per second. Everyone is distracted by frequent flashing, but persons who have seizure disorders are put in danger.
Navigation and control for designers and developers
The more complicated components of the website are handled by designers and developers.
These specialists have greater technical expertise, but they also bear greater responsibility for maintaining the site’s accessibility.
Make sure the facilitator of your ADA website accessibility training course can answer more difficult web design and development-related queries.
The website ought to be keyboard-navigable. This entails the use of components like menus that can be opened and closed with a single click, and skip navigation links. There should be no “keyboard traps” where a user could get trapped.
The website can reflow. For mobile users or people with visual impairments, reflow enables the site to reorganize based on screen size or magnification.
The website can be used without color or images. By disabling images and style sheets in your browser, you can verify this for yourself. If browsing your website without them is challenging, utilizing a screen reader will make it significantly more challenging.
Ways to test. Designers and developers should be able to test the site to make sure any updates or additions are still accessible, as they’re in charge of its functionality, navigation, and appearance. Both manual testing techniques and a variety of programmatic testing tools can be useful.
It’s crucial to keep in mind that web accessibility isn’t simply one person’s duty, even if some people will have more experience with the website than others.
Anyone who works on the website should be aware of the importance of online accessibility, as well as how to maintain it.
Your website will stay accessible to all visitors if you provide ADA website accessibility training, audits, and corrective actions.
The Basic Guidelines of WCAG 2.0 Standards
Be noticeable
Every user should have the capacity to comprehend any information that appears on the website. Pictures, texts, and videos, alongside other content, fall into this kind of category.
Noticeable refers to adequately providing the best options to actively create good accessibility. For example, the text-to-speech option should be readily available for individuals who are blind.
Be practical
The website should be easy to utilize for all kinds of visitors. Every feature you get to provide, comprising the site tools, should be easily accessible to every user. This will probably need to be written into HTML, so you’ll need web developers that are current on compliance guidelines provided by ADA.
Be perceptible
Users are expected to be capable of comprehending what they’re reading, paying attention to, and other content in addition to actively being capable of “seeing” and navigating your website. Including instructions as well as the website tools, forms, navigation menu, or other services the website offers is a way to bring this idea to life.
Be strong
You need your disabled visitors to have a similar experience as non-disabled visitors, even if the disabled ones are supported by technologies. This simply explains that your website’s content is expected to be easily accessible to all persons, notwithstanding how the content is presented.
Don’t condense directions, descriptions, or other explanations. Give all users the full experience to handle them equally.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Which websites must comply with the ADA?
A website must be ADA-compliant if it sells goods and services to the general public or on behalf of another company. Any size business in any industry is affected by this. Legal compliance with the ADA is necessary.
How many websites adhere to ADA standards?
According to studies on web accessibility, less than 2% of websites worldwide are fully compliant. Although a sizable portion of websites is in some way accessible, the great majority of websites don’t effectively target the impaired market.
Which websites must comply with the ADA?
Web accessibility regulations and criteria apply to you if your website sells goods and/or services to the general public. You run the danger of spending a lot of money on lawsuits if your website discriminates against persons with impairments.
How can websites be made ADA-compliant?
Making your website accessible entails making sure persons with disabilities and those utilizing assistive technologies may access it completely.
The most fundamental adjustments you should make are below…
- Image alt-tag creation
- Transcribing audio and video content
- Color contrast ratios being changed
- Examining the components of your website, such as the buttons, links, and headers
Conclusion
Websites are always changing. One should hope that new material is consistently introduced and that the design interface is continuously improved. Periodic WCAG audits should be planned to maintain accessibility.
You can use automatic auditing tools to check on new pages, products, and blog articles until significant interface changes are made. Manual and assistive technology testing should be done on the impacted pages/templates after significant modifications are made.
Although it can seem difficult, ADA website compliance is possible. Recognize that you can tackle it in stages.
For some, ADA compliance has to deal with redesigning your website to ensure that the options for accessibility are well integrated into HTML coding.
Although costly and time-consuming, it is also important. Also, if one doesn’t do it, the cost will rapidly increase.
Consider ADA compliance as a good positive. Making companies inclusive of all kinds of individuals will increase business and also improve companies’ reputations.
