How To Get an ADA Compliant Website

Yes. In 2018, the Department of Justice confirmed 4 Amendments to extend the laws of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) from the physical world (wheelchair ramps, handicap spaces, entryways to accommodate special needs, etc) to the digital and Web world. Most of us had no idea any of this was even happening and how it affects our organization?

In addition to the ADA Compliance Standards, there are also: The Rehabilitation Act, Department of Education (DOE), Office of Civil Rights (OCR), Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA), and the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CCVA). At a state level, Arizona, California, and New York have state level accessibility legislation.

Unless your business has made an effort to make your site ADA Website Compliant, assume that it is not compliant. At a minimum, you should have all of your website pages Level AA compliant or make a good faith effort to get there.   Level AA compliance is often enough to remove the risk of lawsuits and overly expensive remediation.

Compliancy is listed as Level A, AA, and AAA.  AA is the norm that should be reached to remove a lawsuit risk.  

Our ADA Solution utilizes two phases, or parts that, together, achieve compliance, within 48 hours.

The first is our foreground application, the accessibility interface, which is responsible for 30% of the requirements, mostly UI and design-related.

The second is the background AI application which is responsible for the remaining 70% of requirements, mostly related to blind people’s screen-reader adjustments, and keyboard navigation optimizations for people with motor impairments.

Once the ADA Solution is completed with 48 hours, you’ll receive an Accessibility Statement and certification of performance directly to your email.

This is part of the “magic” of our AI solution.

Our foreground application handles the UI (user interface) accessibility requirements, allowing persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI and design to their individual needs. Our solution replaces the old-fashioned method of compromising your site’s design, in favor of accessibility.

Here are some of our interface’s capabilities:
● Font handling – users can increase and decrease font size, change its family (type), adjust spacing, alignment, line height, and more.
● Color handling – users can select various color contrast profiles such as light, dark, inverted, and monochrome. Additionally, users can swap color schemes of titles, texts, and backgrounds, with over 7 different color options.
● Animations – users with epilepsy can stop all running animations at the click of a button. This includes videos, GIFs and CSS flashing transitions.
● Content highlighting – users can emphasize important elements, such as links and titles. They can also highlight particular focused or hovered elements.
● Audio muting – users with hearing devices may experience headaches or other issues due to automatic audio playing. This option allows users to mute the entire website instantly.
● Cognitive disorders – we utilize a search engine that is linked to Wikipedia and Wiktionary, allowing people with cognitive disorders to decipher meanings of phrases, initials, slang, and more.
● Other options – users can change the cursor’s color and sizing, view in printing mode, enable a virtual keyboard, and much more.

Our ADA solution will certify your website pages, which many times is about 90% of your website compliance needs.  However, your website may also have external document formats that we will not be certified ADA compliant through the software. These files are housed outside of your website’s code.  

This does not include the following document types:

• PDFs
• Word, Excel, or Powerpoint documents
• Videos

We can offer additional remediation suggestions and assistance for these types of documents. We would first analyze to see if these documents are viewed often/have much traffic,  and actually need to still be on your website.

Lastly, if your website has an element that is very unique and does not exist almost anywhere else, such as a quiz, games, ticketing section, map, builder feature or any other rare component, we may not be able to fix it automatically. AI and machine learning technologies depend on a high amount of encounters and data in order to be accurate, which means one of a kind elements will need to be viewed with human eyes and brains. 

ADA compliance is not a simple yes or no in terms of a website being compliant.  It is a matter of degrees. There are hundreds of elements in the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and it is very difficult to satisfy them all, regardless of who built the website or how they built it.  The WCAG is not even part of the ADA law, so the idea of your website being “compliant” is an imprecise term.  However, out AI Solution uses advanced artificial intelligence technology to cover as many of these elements as possible.

We cannot guarantee 100% WCAG compliancy or that you will not be targeted for a lawsuit, or potential damages or consequences resulting from our AI Solution.  In the United States, a business or person can be sued for any reason.  However, the Level AA compliancy our service offers, and Accessibility Statement which shows exactly what has been done to make your website compliant is a strong defense in defusing any potential litigation.  To date, we have not had any of our clients have ADA compliancy legal issues while usin gour AI Solution.