The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. The ADA applies to all public accommodations, including websites. This means that if you have a website, it must be accessible to people with disabilities by using tools such as accessiBe WordPress.
Organizations that violate the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) may be subject to legal penalties. However, these penalties vary depending on whether your organization is a public or private entity and what type of violation was committed. The Department of Justice has made it clear that “Voluntary compliance by an entity responsible for providing goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations is a commonly used and useful approach to securing the rights of individuals with disabilities under the ADA, failure by such an entity to comply with a provision of this part also raises concerns about whether discrimination against individuals with disabilities has occurred.”
In other words, if you have a website that violates any of these guidelines, you violate the ADA. Therefore, here are some guidelines that you must follow to ensure your website is completely ADA compliant.
Image Descriptions
Image descriptions are necessary if an image on a page would otherwise be incomprehensible to someone who cannot see the image. Example: An audio-video of a man speaking with several people seated at a conference table behind him. The audio description should read, “A photograph showing four men standing around a conference table.”
In addition, adding a description can also help those who visit your website using a screen reader. Screen readers are software programs that allow people with vision disabilities to read the contents of a webpage aloud or to braille displays. The description will tell them exactly what the image is and how it fits into the context of the article.
Alt-Text
All alt-text should be between 50 and 300 characters. This is the maximum number of characters that will fit on one line for users reading text-based content on your website. The screen readers read this text as soon as it pops up on the webpage, so make sure to use enough words to convey your point without being wordy accurately.
Text Size
When people are on the internet, they are usually doing other things simultaneously. This means their eyes don’t always focus on the text immediately. For example, they might be trying to talk to a friend or tend to a child while keeping up with what is said in an article. Because of this, you must set a text size that is large enough for people to see from a distance. This will also allow users who have vision disabilities to see the text from a short distance, so they can avoid having their screen reader zoom in on the information they need to read.
Color Contrast
The color contrast must be sufficient for people with low vision or color blindness to read your content. You can ensure that these people can read your content by providing high color contrast. Like you see in this article, the color combination of white text on a black background meets these guidelines.