Can I Be Sued If My Website Is Not ADA Compliant?

Most successful brands like Amazon, Walmart, Nike and Domino’s got sued when they failed to make their websites ADA compliant. ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) is a law that defines rules and specific guidelines to make the technology accessible to everyone. When a business website lacks the specifics, it is considered non-compliant and it gets highly vulnerable to lawsuits.

Coming back to the question, can you be sued for not making your website ADA compliant? The answer is affirmative! By avoiding the ADA compliance guidelines, you are putting your business at the risk of legal recourse and financial loss. In today’s post, we will discuss, how to minimize the risks of getting sued?

What is the significance of ADA compliance?

ADA determines the usability of your website content. Developing an ADA compliant website is a good practice. Taking steps towards a compliant website is beneficial in various ways:

1. You are protected against the hassles of litigation and expensive settlements.
2. It ensures that all your potential users are able to access your content and don’t switch to your competitor’s website.
3. With widened reach to the target audience, you can make higher profits.
4. It represents your accountability and more and more vendors get impressed by your compliant levels and prefer to conduct business with you.

How to make an ADA compliant website?

WCAG  (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is a framework that allows developers and business owners to establish ground rules to achieve compliance. Currently, three versions of WCAG have been released, i.e. WCAG 2.0. 2.1 and 2.2. It is suggested to aim for the latest versions to minimize the scope of errors.

Some websites are developed using ADA plugins to automatically achieve compliance levels. If you already have a live website developed a long ago then it’s high time to revamp it. Address the accessibility issues and steer clear of the penalties and lawsuits. It can be done quickly with the help of ADA compliant website checkers, which is discussed in the next section.

How to check your website for ADA compliance?

ADA compliance guidelines mandate that the design of your website should be easy to navigate and easy to understand. There should be provisions to access the website if someone with a disability is using it. For instance, there should be text to speech functionality for the vision impaired users. Besides, people with cognitive disabilities should also feel valued while accessing your website with less confusing navigation options, easy form filling options and error alerts.

The list of ADA compliant web development practices is quite long. Considering the wide number of principles suggested in the WCAG guidelines, it is imperative to seek professional guidance.

The experts can use two ways to verify your compliance levels:

• Automated scans using a website ADA compliance checker tool
• Thorough investigation via ADA compliance manual audits

A suite of evaluation tools is quite popular and very easy to use. However, automated scans are capable to detect errors related to contrast ratio or missing Alt text. For a comprehensive investigation of user experience, it is important to hire third party audit experts.

Compliance issues that are not detected during software scans can be tackled efficiently by accessibility specialists. If you don’t want to get sued, visit the link given below.