Impact of Embracing Web Accessibility
Over the past three years, web accessibility has become one of the fastest-growing issues in the legal and technological fields. Within time, web accessibility brought with it a whole host of benefits and motivations which go beyond just avoiding being sued, digital accessibility has become from a moral duty and a transparency commitment. What is the impact of embracing web accessibility? What’s in jeopardy when your web site is not accessible? How can your website benefit from digital accessibility? In this article, you’ll find the 5 reasons why web accessibility is a risk too big to take and an opportunity far too big to miss for any civic government today.
1. Compliance with current regulations Let’s kickoff with one of the main reasons why web accessibility is important to any government today-the legal risks of not being accessible. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been on the books for nearly thirty years. Even though it doesn’t mention websites anywhere, Title III of the ADA has been interpreted by U.S. courts and affirmed by the Department of Justice in late 2018 to apply to websites. Almost one year before that, in January 2017, the U.S. Access Board published a final rule updating the standards covered by Section 508 of the federal law known as the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It incorporated and selected international standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) to be applied to websites, electronic documents, and software. Lawsuits with claims on web accessibility began to spike in 2015, a trend that hasn’t subsided. According to the best available data, over 260 suits were filed by the end of 2016. In 2017, 430 lawsuits were filed in the first half of the year, and the number unexpectedly doubled to 814 by the end of Q3. During 2018, thousands of cases were filed all across the United States, with New York and Florida topping the list. We saw a rise of 177% in 2017 with 2258 lawsuits, both individual and class action, filed by blind or visually impaired plaintiffs.
2. Avoid the cost of getting sued Even though it would be unfair to describe most ADA lawsuits this way, some experts call it the wave of “corporate extortion”. Businesses and governments are being urged to take a serious look at their websites and ensure that their digital presence is accessible to all users. Against these kinds of lawsuits, businesses face financial penalties of not being compliant. In cases where both parties agree to settle, currently, the average is set at a minimum of $20,000. If the company loses the case in court, the fine can be up to $55,000. This excludes the cost of attorney fees, paying the plaintiff a huge compensation for damages and redesigning the websites to become compliant within a matter of days. Given these numbers, it is clear that the cost of not being compliant can be crushing.
3. Expand your audience When it comes to prioritizing web accessibility, the benefits are far greater than you think. In a world where 1 out of 4 people encounter accessibility issues while using the web, incorporating accessibility features can actually help business growth by making the site friendly to all users, thus expanding your site’s audience. An accessible site allows the content, product, and service to be available to a wider range of people besides users with disabilities, including elderly people with age-related disabilities and users with circumstantial needs. Conversely, by ignoring the issue, accessibility can cut off constituent access. This means that you’d be turning your back on 20% of the world’s population-or 1.3 billion people-who experience any type of disability. To illustrate this point, take the average visually impaired user. He or she probably uses screen reader software to navigate through websites. These assertive devices rely on different code structures and standards of the site’s code to determine the context and structure of the web page. A site must be programmed in order to be compatible with this software. A website that isn’t suitable for a screen reader is essentially closed off to a large segment of visually impaired customers, as 71% of disabled users will click away from a website that they find difficult to use.
4. Boost your SEO efforts Another point to consider is how accessibility affects website visibility on search engine results and a site’s overall SEO rating. One of the most important factors for a website’s SEO status is providing a good user experience as it affects the amount of time users spend on your website interacting with your content. An accessible site is, by its nature, easier to navigate, no matter the user’s disabilities, and goes hand-in-hand with enhancing the user experience and site usability. It enables users to experience more extensive, comfortable and practical navigation, ultimately making the bounce rate lower. In this way, you also ensure that customers and constituents keep coming back. In addition, many SEO requirements overlap with accessibility best practices, such as providing quality and accessible content and implementing an intuitive design universal to all users. Most of the technical practices such as the use of the right semantics, descriptive alternative text in all visuals, an organized header structure, title tags and more, relate to the site’s compatibility. It makes your site accessible to different types of navigation’s such as keyboard navigation or visually-impaired using screen readers.
5. Improve your brand reputation Accessible organizations are perceived more positively in today’s world, social and corporate responsibility are concepts which people value. As shown in Forbes’s cited study published last November, corporate social responsibility is a key strategy for providing increased transparency. A website that boasts an accessibility interface possesses a “quality label” of sorts, a clear indication that the site’s operator is a community who cares about providing for their users’ equal access and adapts to their needs.
About Datanet For the past twelve years, DATANET has sold competitive Agenda Management products and installed many large and complex solutions. During this period, customers related that, while they needed some of the functionality of these more complex solutions and have many of the same reporting challenges of larger communities, but did not have the budget to implement large enterprise solutions nor did they have internal IT resources to manage these larger products As you probably already know, the settlement fees for an ADA lawsuit are very costly and manual accessibility services are equally expensive. In order to solve this challenge and continue providing you with the best services we can, we’ve recently partnered with a company called accessiBe
accessiBe offers the best solution we’ve found to get you protected and at a very reasonable price. The service costs $490 per year, per website under 1000 pages We highly recommend this as a precaution to be safe from lawsuits and avoid any unnecessary exposures.
