Why Website Accessibility Matters to Small Businesses
Many business owners may not realize that their business is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and it's not about the steep entry to a physical location, it's about your website's accessibility.
Disclaimer: We are NOT lawyers and this is not intended as legal advice.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was originally published in 1990 and has since been updated with several amendments. The most recent update was published by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2018 claiming that websites are a place for public accommodation.
As small business owners, we realize how hard it is to keep up with new legislation and the ever-changing world of technology concerning websites.
We also realize that small businesses typically operate on a tight budget and often do most of their administrative tasks in-house, causing them to be more vulnerable to website accessibility lawsuits.
It can be expensive to hire a coder to develop a fully accessible site, so we’re here to share how to make your website more accessible along with relatively inexpensive options for achieving full compliance.
We are here as a resource to help small businesses comply with legalities that apply, and to help small businesses be inclusive for the entirety of their customer base.
Keep reading to discover what website accessibility is and means, how it may impact your business legally, and how to make sure your website accommodates various impairments and disabilities.
What is Website Accessibility?
It is a common misconception that, if your website is published on the internet, everyone can see and use it.
However, many different types of impairments prevent users from viewing, using, or navigating a web page.
1 in 4 internet users have impairments that impact the way they surf the web.
Users can be prevented from accessing websites by vision, motor, neurological or cognitive impairments. These impairments may be permanent, temporary, or situational.
Accessible websites accommodate these impairments and allow users to view and use the website seamlessly, often paired with assistive technology (like screenreaders or a specialized mouse).
If your website is unusable for people with disabilities, it may be in violation of the ADA, or worse, it could be turning consumers with impairments away from your website.
The ADA refers to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as the standard for all that makes a website fully accessible and therefore in compliance with the ADA. The most recently published version is WCAG 2.1.
Check to see if your website is accessible
Use accessiBe’s Access Scan by entering your domain name to quickly see if your website is accessible or where you can improve in terms of the ADA’s web accessibility standards.
why An Accessible Website is great for small Businesses
Before we discuss why it’s legally important to have an accessible website, we want to highlight a few of the reasons why website accessibility is good for business.
You wouldn't turn away every 4th customer at a physical location, and it should not be any different on your website.
70% of people with disabilities click away from a website as soon as they discover an accessibility issue.
As soon as a site becomes difficult to use, most users navigate away from the site, regardless of their abilities.
In marketing and data analysis, when someone visits your website and exits immediately, it is known as a "bounce." Every website developer’s goal is to decrease the bounce rate because it negatively impacts your website’s performance in the eyes of search engines and advertising.
Making your website more accessible is one way to achieve a lower bounce rate. It will also improve your site’s overall user experience.
90% of customers do not notify the company of the barriers they face in accessing their website.
You may be unaware of your site’s shortcomings because users are unlikely to reach out.
Decreasing barriers and making it easy for all customers to support your business is essential for creating success.
Having an Accessibility Statement on your website that encourages responses can open the conversation to those who find your website inaccessible.
The ADA states that “once people with disabilities find a business where they can shop or get services in an accessible manner, they become repeat customers”
We all know, repeat customers are the best customers. It's important to make new customers feel welcome and included so they feel inclined to return.
There are two ways to make Your Website Accessible
Catering to all kinds of customers may seem like a daunting task considering all impairments that they may have.
Although web accessibility is a relatively new concept in terms of legalities, it is here to stay.
Soon, the cost of making your website in compliance with the ADA and WCAG guidelines will not be optional.
There are two ways to make your website accessible: one is a manual way and the other is automated.
Manually Implemented Accessible Design and Structure to Every Web Page
When designing a website, it helps to understand the kinds of impairments users may have and how to accommodate them.
Unfortunately, content management systems like Squarespace, WordPress, and Shopify do not automatically apply accessibility standards to their websites.
We realize that it may be extremely time-consuming to learn and apply accessible practices to your website, or expensive if you choose to hire a professional coder that specializes in accessibility. Keep reading, because the second option may save you the hassle.
Here we have highlighted some of the impairments impacted by inaccessible websites and ways to make your website accessible.
Motor Impairments
People with motor impairments that affect their arms or hands will use a specialized mouse, keyboard, head mouse, head pointer, mouth-stick, voice recognition, or eye-gaze system to navigate on a computer.
Some features on your website may be difficult to navigate with these technologies. These features include drop-down menus, clickable links, buttons, form submissions, or anything that you use your mouse to “hover” or click.
All clickable features on your website will need to be coded with the appropriate tags that navigation tools can understand.
Vision impairments
Blindness
Blind internet users have a refreshable braille display or screen reader that reads content on a website aloud. Blind users often use a keyboard to navigate the internet.
These tools transform a website’s design into verbal communication. They read the alternative text (often referred to as alt-text) in place of images and will verbalize the URL of all links unless provided with a link description.
To make your website accommodate blind users, be sure to label all photos with descriptive alt-text and avoid unnecessarily long links without labels.
Partial Blindness
Users experiencing partial blindness may have difficulty reading small text or certain font styles.
Color-blindness
Text or images with low contrast may not be visible.
Choosing font colors and background colors with high color contrast will ensure color-blind individuals can consume your website’s content.
Neurological impairments
Photosensitive Epilepsy
People with photosensitive epilepsy have a kind of reflex epilepsy, meaning that seizures occur in response to a stimulus.
Seizures may be triggered by flashing, flickering, or blinking of content on your website.
Videos or gifs that automatically play on your website can also induce a seizure. Some patterns, such as stripes, and colors, like red, can be harmful to people with photosensitive epilepsy.
If your website has moving elements, giving users a seizure-safe option that pauses moving elements can improve your website’s accessibility and help your business cater to those impacted by photosensitive epilepsy.
Cognitive impairments
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
People with ADHD tend to have difficulty staying focused and organized. Pop-ups, sounds, and moving graphics can hinder the ADHD community from staying focused on your content which may even prevent a purchase.
To make sure users with ADHD can view, focus on, and consume your website’s content, add a feature that stops moving graphics or highlights text as the cursor hovers over it.
Autism
Similar to ADHD, users with autism also have difficulty focusing.
The best ways to make your website accessible to people with autism:
make sure your site’s navigation is consistent across pages
avoid clutter and distractions
provide definitions for any non-standard terms such as idioms, jargon, abbreviations, and acronyms.
Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a condition that involves difficulty reading and understanding text.
To accommodate users with Dyslexia, it’s important to make sure that the font on your page is not only readable but has proper spacing. Be sure to highlight or differentiate clickable links and headings.
Many people with dyslexia prefer customizable settings that allow them to adjust the font size and letter spacing.
Other Impairments
Impairments that impact someone’s internet browsing ability may be permanent, temporary, or even situational.
These impairments may be something that someone is born with, but it is also a huge possibility that your customers may develop an impairment in the future.
There is a very wide range of impairments that may impact the way a user views a web page, and the goal is to ensure equal access for all users.
The WCAG rules generally center around being Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR). Designing your website to embody these four characteristics will help to improve accessibility, but it will not necessarily comply with all of the WCAG’s guidelines.
Be sure to run an accessibility scan after you design your website to see where you can improve your digital accessibility and compliance with the ADA.
2. Install an Accessibility Overlay
Since the guidelines for ADA and WCAG compliance are extensive, and there are many factors to account for in terms of the design and functionality of a website, developers have created a more simple solution: Accessibility Overlays.
Powered by AI technology, an Accessibility Overlay provides users with accessible settings to change as they view your website.
These widgets also use AI technology to predict the alt-text of images if left blank, and help screen readers properly describe websites in a coherent way. Plus, overlays are compatible with all assistive technologies ensuring a smooth experience for users visiting your website.
The icon pictured here is widely known for representing accessibility. On our website, the smaller version of this icon represents our Accessibility Widget.
When you click on an Accessibility Widget, it presents many options for features that automatically apply to your website to make it more accessible depending on user preferences. Check it out!
It was incredibly easy for us to install (by adding one line of code to the footer) and it made our website accessible within 48 hours.
There are many competing providers of quick solutions to add to your website to comply with ADA and WCAG guidelines, like AudioEye, UserWay, and acessiBe.
We are partnered with accessiBe and can provide a discount on all of their services when you sign up through us.
We realize that there is a large amount of misinformation against Accessibility Overlays provided by third parties. We’ve done the research and found that this misinformation typically stems from largely successful companies that manually code accessible websites. Here’s a video of a C4-5 Quadriplegic and Trial Attorney explaining the misinformation.
Why does Web Accessibility matter to Small Businesses?
Lawsuits
Since 2018, there has been a rise in lawsuits regarding website accessibility. Most of these lawsuits settle outside of court for tens of thousands of dollars.
The ADA lists all of the following types of businesses as public accommodation:
Retail stores and other sales or retail establishments;
Banks;
Hotels, inns, and motels;
Hospitals and medical offices;
Food and drink establishments; and
Auditoriums, theaters, and sports arenas.
If your business is involved in one of these industries, it’s possible that you could face an ADA lawsuit in the future.
The majority of web accessibility lawsuits at this point involve large corporations or are concentrated in large states like New York, California, and Florida.
It does not matter how big or small your business may be; all it takes is one person to get frustrated with the functionality of your website to file a complaint.
For example, a small boutique athleisure company based in Orlando, FL recently closed its doors after being sued for web accessibility. The owner said “I never in my wildest dreams thought a website would have to have accommodations. My builder knew about ADA compliance for my physical location. My web developer did not.”
Online-Only Businesses MIGHT be safe from Web Accessibility Lawsuits
We want to clarify, we are NOT lawyers and this is not intended as legal advice.
One California judge ruled that Website-Only Businesses cannot be sued in California or Federal Court due to Congress' lack of guidance on website accessibility. Having a business that only exists online may protect you from an accessibility lawsuit.
Access Overlays can Provide Legal Guidance
When you use accessiBe’s Access Widget, for example, your website will automatically become fully compliant with all of the ADA and WCAG guidelines (they even provide an Accessibility Statement within the Access Widget). Additionally, accessiBe offers a full litigation support package in case of a lawsuit regarding your web accessibility.
Using a third party can help you to stay legally compliant because the overlays will be updated as rules change. They also scan your website on a regular basis to ensure compliance as any changes to the site is made.
Reputation
Protecting yourself from a lawsuit is not the only reason that Small Businesses should focus on making an accessible website.
Businesses should make an accessible website because it is morally and ethically the right thing to do.
As a business owner, you should be proud to show off your new and improved accessible site. Advertise that your business is here to serve EVERYBODY and there are the steps you have taken to prove it.
Making Your Website Accessible may be Tax-Deductible
If your business has fewer than 30 full-time employees or made less than $1,000,000 in revenue last year, you may be eligible for "Disabled Access Credit" up to $15,000 per year. Accessibility Widgets for small websites typically cost around $500 per year.
All Websites Should be Fully Accessible
In conclusion, website accessibility is a relatively new concept, legally, but it is here to stay. As business owners and leaders in our communities, it is our job to stand up for what we believe in and back up those beliefs with action.
By making your website fully accessible, you are showing your customer base that you care about them, regardless of their impairments, and you want them to be able to access your website, content, products, and more, with ease.
Reach out to us today for a free consultation to see how we can help your website gain full compliance with ADA and WCAG guidelines.
