Accessible Web Design Services

To a great extent, the information and opportunities you’ve accessed on the web has made positive impacts on your daily life. Depriving others of this opportunity is wrong on so many levels. For this reason, making your website accessible to everyone regardless of their living condition should be a priority.

To truly understand the importance of accessibility, you need to unlock a higher level of empathy by placing yourself in others’ shoes. You can do this by answering this simple question: “How would you feel if you found it difficult to get access to opportunities or even stay informed on things that truly matter to you?” Not great, yeah? Sadly, the design of many websites has made such access and interaction difficult for specific individuals.

Here are two more reasons why you should consider your website’s accessibility a priority:

Gives you a competitive edge

With an accessible website, you can reach more people with your business, particularly people with special needs. An accessible website makes it easy for this category of people to interact with your site and take your desired business action.

A mere improvement on your website’s accessibility can acquire new customers, thus more sales. In fact, a 2018 report by the American Institutes for Research on the purchasing power of working-age adults living with a disability shows that their disposable income (income after tax deductions) is close to $500 billion.

With accessibility on your side, you can tap into a new market with massive buying power. Making your website accessible to more people gives you a competitive edge in the marketplace over those who err on the side of accessibility. There are several testaments to the positive impact of accessibility on a company’s bottom line.

For moral and legal reasons

An accessible website provides educational and informational opportunities for people with disabilities that many of us take for granted. Your commitment to accessibility shows a good sense of ethics and morals and improves your company’s public image.

Also, in some countries, specific statewide laws and policies enforce website accessibility. Some of them include the Canada Human Rights Act, China’s Voluntary Web Accessibility Standard, European Union Web, and Mobile Accessibility Directive, and the American’s with Disabilities Act (ADA), to name a few.

Here is a guide to the full list of laws and policies. Still, more and more regulations are being proposed and implemented to enforce equal rights and opportunities for people regardless of their living conditions. Businesses need to ensure that everybody, including individuals with disabilities, can benefit from their digital space presence.

Looking for compliant website design services? We specialize in ADA compliant accessible web design services and would love to help make your site more inclusive.

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We’re in the digital era, no doubt about that. The need for regular access to information and opportunities in the digital space is on the rise. Since the coronavirus’s impact, our reliance on the internet and its related technologies for survival became apparent.

Now imagine not being able to access the host of information and opportunities that the internet provides with ease. Sadly, this is the reality of people living with disabilities. Every day, they struggle to stay informed and gain access to things that truly matter to them on the internet due to the host of barriers that inaccessible websites cause.

Various countries worldwide have taken notice and enacted several non-discrimination laws and web-accessibility policies. These laws ensure that website owners take responsibility upon themselves to make useful digital content inclusive and accessible to everyone regardless of their living conditions.

Some of these laws, especially the new ones, are with deadlines for compliance and penalties for non-compliance. Yet, recent studies still show that most websites fail to meet the standards for accessibility as benchmarked by WCAG.

A recent study by WebAIM, in February 2020, of the top 1,000,000 websites, showed that 98.1% (a 2.1% increase from the previous year) of website’s homepages failed to meet WCAG 2 standards of web accessibility.

Failure of websites to meet the accessibility laws and policies no doubt exposes them to lawsuits. The issue of web accessibility for persons with disabilities has been an issue for many years. Still, many companies only tend to take it seriously when they’ve been served with a lawsuit.

In fact, there’s been a significant rise in the rate of cases over the years esp in the United States. Since about 26% of the population (1 in 4 adults) live with a disability in the United States, businesses must ensure they provide equal access to all manner of individuals or face the reality of accessibility lawsuits as mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Essentially, organizations should ensure that their website complies with accessibility standards so that individuals with disabilities can benefit from the digital space like everybody else.

Looking for compliant website design services? We specialize in ADA compliant accessible web design services and would love to help make your site more inclusive.

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“ADA” is the acronym for “American with Disabilities Act,” initially signed in 1990. The law is a civil rights law against the discrimination of individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life.

In September 2010, authorities extended the law to include the Standards for Accessible Design, which states that all digital/electronic information and technology must be accessible to people living with disabilities such as visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive disabilities.

Essentially, to comply with ADA-requirements, your website must be designed to aid easy interaction and accessibility for people with disabilities. Any website with accessibility barriers would typically be violating this law.

To comply with accessibility policies, you must make provision for your website’s content to be accessed using a keyboard, it must have text alternatives for images, audio, videos, and follow the WCAG 2.0 level AA (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)

Non-compliance with these standards of the WCAG guidelines could invite lawsuits and legal actions.

Looking for compliant website design services? We specialize in ADA compliant accessible web design services and would love to help make your site more inclusive.

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An accessible website must meet these four (4) significant elements of accessibility as defined by the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). It must be:

• Perceivable: If your website is perceivable, it means users can easily discern your website’s content using the various sense organs. To ensure that your website is perceivable with all the senses, you should leverage transcripts for audio contents, videos, etc. Also, there should be an alternative text for images. (this text describes images in a way that screen readers can understand)
• Operable: If your website is operable, it means that users can operate and navigate your website’s user interface easily. This also means your site should be accessible through keyboards or a mouse. And various assistive technologies for disabled people should integrate well with your website.
• Understandable: When a website is understandable, it means that information on its web pages is coherent, clear, and readable. This means that the information on your website should be legible. People should understand the layout and design (user interface) without difficulty.
• Robust: Finally, if your website is robust, then users can easily access your website with the different digital tools for accessing web content. This means users can access your website with various browsers and assistive technologies for people with disabilities, such as screen readers.

An accessible website must meet all these four requirements to be considered compliant with web accessibility policies.

Looking for compliant website design services? We specialize in ADA compliant accessible web design services and would love to help make your site more inclusive.

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Yes, it does. For instance, the concept of accessibility will mean something different for an older man than compared to an individual with a disability. Besides, the meaning of accessibility will also vary depending on an individual’s disability type. A person with visual impairment would view accessibility differently than someone with hearing impairment.

Lastly, to some people, the concept of accessibility also goes beyond making provisions for individuals with disabilities. For them, accessibility also concerns people with low network speed or people living in rural areas.

Looking for compliant website design services? We specialize in ADA compliant accessible web design services and would love to help make your site more inclusive.

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Yes, several tools can evaluate the accessibility of any website. However, being able to carefully and correctly evaluate a website’s accessibility will require training and experience.

If you’re looking to determine your website’s accessibility compliance, then look no further, as ShiftWeb can do this for you! We have partnered up with Accessibe, the most trusted and affordable solution to making your website accessible.

Ask us about our affordable accessible web design services today!

Looking for compliant website design services? We specialize in ADA compliant accessible web design services and would love to help make your site more inclusive.

Schedule a Free Discovery Call

We can make your whole website accessible and compliant for only $490/year! Get in touch or schedule a call to get your site compliant in less than one week.

Yes, you can. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) offers a Disabled Access Credit to businesses that invest in making their websites accessible to individuals with disabilities. This tax credit is worth up to 50% of eligible accessibility expenses, with a maximum annual credit of $5,000. To qualify, your business must have generated $1,000,000 or less in the previous year or employ 30 or fewer full-time employees. Simply fill out Form 8826 and attach it to your annual tax return to apply for this valuable benefit. By making your website ADA-compliant, you can enhance accessibility and potentially reduce your tax liability. Learn more here.