Almost every business owner in America is aware of the legal requirement of optimizing the web accessibility of their business website. But a few of them might have some misconceptions regarding the accessibility compliance and its necessity. We spoke to a few web accessibility experts about these misconceptions to get a better insight. These are the ones we discussed, along with what we learned about them.
A Negligible Portion Of The American Population Needs An Accessible Website
If you thought that only a small percentage of the American population needs accessibility to websites, you could not be more mistaken. According to the recent census, almost one-fifth of the American population have disabilities. That is approximately 60 million people. If you have a global company, more than 15% of the world population can benefit from the accessibility of your website. Adhering to accessibility guidelines can help a lot of people other than the users with disabilities, such as:
• Older people can benefit from larger fonts and captions on videos.
• People with a different native language who cannot read English as well as others.
• People that have attention deficit disorder.
• People who have vision problems or color blindness can benefit from web content with better color contrast.
• Some people might have situational or temporary problems because they had an accident or have undergone an operation. These people might need to use assistive technologies temporarily.
If you add up the number of these people to those with disabilities, you are looking at a large part of the American population. Optimizing the accessibility standards of your website can prove beneficial for your business, or you might miss out on a large chunk of the market.
It Takes A Lot Of Time, Money And Energy To Make A Website Accessible
If you wait to test your website or app for accessibility issues after the entire process of development is complete, you might find a lot of errors and bugs. Therefore the right strategy is testing the accessibility compliance of your website and app after every stage gets developed. If you follow the right approach, accessibility experts guarantee that it will not be a costly or time-consuming effort.
You might be intimidated by the method at first. But you have to remember the time when we all had to prioritize the mobile phone compatibility of the websites. The process of diminished breakpoints to match the pixel size of phones had seemed frustrating. But soon, it became a part of the regular workflow of developing websites. Similarly, optimizing the digital accessibility of your website could seem challenging at first. But later, it will become second nature for your developers and content team to incorporate the accessibility standards.
Fulfilling Accessibility Guidelines Is A One-Time Effort For Website Developers
You would be mistaken if you thought that all the web accessibility guidelines could be met during the development stage of your website. Of course, the designers need to make sure that the website programming is optimized to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). But a business website always needs to stay dynamic and ever-changing to keep up with the market trends, user experience, competition, and search engine optimization. So it is not only your website designer's responsibility to maintain the accessibility of your company's web content.
There are other groups of people who need to put in continuous efforts towards achieving the WCAG 2.1 specifications. Your sales and marketing team should work together with your content team to ensure that your website stays accessible and optimized. SEO techniques and web content accessibility guidelines often cross paths, so the teams would need to formulate strategies to meet the requirements. The sales and marketing team can provide the content team with the relevant SEO methods. The content team needs to ensure that these techniques are incorporated while making the content accessible to users with disabilities.
Open-Source Testing Tools Can Be Used To Find All The Accessibility Issues And Rectify Them
According to the experts, most open-source automated tools can determine about 41% of the errors at the most. Experts have divided opinions about which tool is the best to use. But they agree that the success rate of every tool is affected by certain factors, such as the web browser used, the device used for testing, prioritization of the bugs, and several others.
So open-source automated tools can be used to test the website partially. But human interference, manual testing and customized automated solutions are required to meet the accessibility guidelines. An ADA Compliance tester can provide you great insight on the complete state of your web accessibility.
There might be a few other misconceptions about website accessibility. But before you agree with them, make sure you consult an expert before you choose to believe them.