Does Your Website Need To Be ADA Compliant?
In today's digital age, having an ADA-compliant website is more important than ever before.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted in 1990 to ensure that individuals with disabilities have equal access to all areas of public life, including the Internet. Failure to comply with ADA regulations can result in costly fines and legal action, but there are many other reasons to make your website accessible to all users.
First and foremost, having an ADA-compliant website is simply the right thing to do.
Everyone deserves equal access to information and resources, regardless of their abilities. By making your website accessible, you are creating a more inclusive online experience for all users.
Additionally, having an ADA-compliant website can improve your brand's reputation and customer loyalty. Customers are more likely to do business with companies that prioritize accessibility and inclusivity and are more likely to recommend those companies to others.
From a practical standpoint, an ADA-compliant website can also increase your website's visibility and search engine rankings. Search engines prioritize websites that are accessible and user-friendly, so making your website ADA-compliant can help improve your SEO and attract more traffic to your site.
Making your website ADA-compliant can actually be a relatively easy process. Since becoming aware of the requirements, we have begun building website accessibility into all websites we launch, including maintenance to keep it running smoothly and worry-free.
If you want to talk to a member of our team about making your website accessible click the link below to schedule a conversation.
Check out the episode now, where you get your podcasts!
Ep. 29:
Does Your Website Need To Be ADA Compliant?
Automated Transcript
Ben Lueders:
How can you save your business thousands of dollars and do the right thing today? Make your website accessible.
Welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand, where we discuss how to create and grow a brand that makes the world a better place for you, your customers, and your employees. I'm Ben Lueders, founder and art director of Fruitful Design and Strategy. This is my business partner and brand strategist, Raj Lulla.
Before we go any further today, I just want to remind you that this is the Growing a Fruitful Brand podcast and not the Growing a Fruitful Law Firm podcast. So if you had mistaken us for your lawyers, you're in the wrong place and probably need to raise your standards before hiring your next attorney.
Raj Lulla:
You're not my lawyer?
Ben Lueders:
I'd be a terrible lawyer.
Raj Lulla:
That said, being uninformed and failing to take action on website accessibility just because we are not your lawyers is not a good idea. It could cost you tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and fines, and more importantly, it leaves your website inaccessible to customers with disabilities.
That said, being uninformed and failing to take action on website accessibility just because we are not your lawyers is a bad idea. It could cost you tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and fines, and more importantly, it will leave your website inaccessible to customers with disabilities.
Not only does inaccessibility make your website discriminatory, but it also will cost you the opportunity to do business with customers who happen to have disabilities. That's not good on any front, and so we want to help you understand what website accessibility is, and what you need to do about it for your business or organization. So let's just start there. Ben, talk us through what is website accessibility?
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, so the ADA, they use this system, they call the pour system for analyzing whether something is accessible or not, and that's pour, P-O-U-R, and the P stands for perceivable. The design of your website needs to be able to be perceived by more than just sight. We think of, obviously your website's a very visual thing, and it is to many of us, but there are some that don't... They can't see, or they have a hard time seeing things, and so it also has to work by sound and by touch, and so this includes text alternatives for non-text content, like alt text on all of your images, video transcripts, audio transcripts, stuff like that.
The O in pour stands for operable. Some users, they can't use your traditional mouse, if you think about it, those that are quadriplegic, et cetera, and they have to be able to navigate your website with a special keyboard.
The U stands for understandable, and this means a lot of things, including that it's easy to understand what level, grade level the content is for the general public, as well as the ability to identify the language of the website, and the last letter, R, stands for robust. Your content has to be able to work on a wide variety of devices, including assistive technologies like screen readers for the visually impaired, et cetera.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, so let's just talk about this for a quick second, because that all went really fast, and that's kind of a lot of take in.
Ben Lueders:
It's a lot of stuff.
Raj Lulla:
Is this something that somebody who just runs their website, they got it handed down the keys when the intern left or whatever, and they're like, "You're managing the website now." Is this something that they're expected to be able to do by themselves?
Ben Lueders:
No, no, absolutely not. This is not something that I ever really expected either when I was first making websites for people. With the best design principles, you'll use good contrast and hierarchy, and some aspects of accessibility is also just good design, but I just mentioned in some of those aspects from the ADA, it's not all visual. These things need to be... A screen reader, which is something that those of us who are not visually impaired don't even think about oftentimes, and you need to be able to understand a website all from an audio translation of your website. So that means people who can't see the images on your website, you need to have good descriptions on those images to describe what they're not seeing.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about some of those things, then. What are some specifics that need to be included on a website?
Ben Lueders:
So some of the main things that will help your website become more accessible are things like unique page titles, alt text. Like I said, alt text on all of your photos, and that can seem like quite the chore, because it's literally describing, for those who can't see your images, what's going on in your image. Your website needs to be navigable... How do you say it?
Raj Lulla:
Navigable.
Ben Lueders:
So good. Via keyboard. So keyboard controls... Be able to go from page to page with a keyboard, not just with a mouse. Transcripts for any audio or video files on your website. So that's like we have our podcast on our website in video form, in an audio form, but we also have a full text transcript underneath, and you're seeing that more and more all across the web, and that's a good thing.
Raj Lulla:
That's also good for your SEO, because it drops keywords into your website as well. So some of these things are not just for accessibility's sake. They also are good marketing principles.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, exactly. That's a good point, Raj, because like I was saying a second ago, a lot of this accessibility stuff is also just good design practices, and it's also good marketing practices. So it's kind of like a win-win-win when you do this, and I'm seeing a lot of that as I was researching this online, is that... Absolutely, yeah, get your whole transcript of your audio or video files on there. You're adding tons of really great keywords to help your search engine optimization.
Some other things are having more descriptive links. I think sometimes we don't think about... We might think about what a button says, but the link behind it might be a bunch of numbers and random stuff that makes sense to us, but isn't actually really descriptive to people who aren't you.
Raj Lulla:
Maybe it doesn't even make sense to us either. Sometimes you just let the website [inaudible 00:07:00] those things on there.
Ben Lueders:
Generate... Absolutely. So just being more thoughtful about how you're naming all of your files and all of your links, and then just proper formatting in general.
The last thing I'd say is also just thinking about making your website, the overall design, the hierarchy, the navigation, as simple as possible, which, again, this is getting to more just good design in general, but having just layers and layers of navigation, having lots and lots of hidden pages and links and stuff like that, and just confusing dropdowns, et cetera, things that you need to have to be an ace on the mouse to be able to navigate, it's not good design, and it's really terrible when it comes to being accessible to those who have different special needs and disabilities.
Raj Lulla:
I'd imagine right now, people who are listening or watching are probably falling into one of two categories. One is, "Oh my gosh, I need to throw my website away and start all over," and then you have the other camp that's like, "Yeah, new day, new government regulation, big surprise. How big of a deal is this?"
Ben Lueders:
Right.
Raj Lulla:
So what would you say to somebody who's maybe in that first camp who is thinking, "Oh my gosh, this sounds like so much work. I don't even know all the standards." This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you just ran us through. I remember there was a website we were doing several years ago that, towards the end, we ran it through an accessibility checker, and we were having to go through and grade certain colors to be like percentage points more contrast from the background so they were easier to see for people who are visually impaired, and that's a lot of work for people who know what they're doing in making a website, let alone incredibly overwhelming for people who don't know what they're doing. They're just tasked with maintaining websites. So what would you say to those people who are hearing this and they're going, "Oh no, I have to bring this to my boss and tell my boss that this is going to be incredibly expensive, and we're going to have to trash our whole website..." What would you tell these folks?
Ben Lueders:
Well, part of me doesn't want to let them off the hook too quickly, because it is kind of overwhelming, actually, and I know exactly what you're talking about, Raj. The implications of this kind of... As you start, you scratch through the surface there, you start really realizing, "Oh darn, does this mean we have to completely rebrand too?", because we settled on these colors, and it turns out that the contrast of this button isn't enough to be accessible for some, and so it is a bit... If you're just to do this on your own and start from scratch, it can be quite daunting, and so we do want to empathize with that, and that is a normal place to be, but I will say, keep listening, and we have an easier solution than having to do that.
Raj Lulla:
No, we don't. This is the end of the podcast. Sorry, you're on... No, of course not.
So before we get there, let's talk about the second group of folks, though, who are maybe wondering, "Okay, new day, new government regulation. Do I really need to be concerned about this?" So in talking about the answer to that question, it really falls into three areas. We talked about one of them already, just the issue of discrimination. So this is what falls into the ethical reason for why we should do this, that it's just the right thing to do, to make your website accessible to as many people as possible.
Then we have what I would call the practical reasons, and we talked about that as well, of... If not as many people can reach your website or interact with your website, then not as many people are going to be able to buy from you, and that might sound a little crass, opportunistic, whatever, but this is one of those rare situations where doing the right thing ethically is also the right thing practically.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, it's a good business decision. Why would you try... By discriminating against this demographic of the public, which is vast...
Raj Lulla:
Oh, wide, wide demographic.
Ben Lueders:
You're not only discriminating against them, you're discriminating against their money. Let's say you're just a really cold-hearted, discriminatory person. I think you'd still be interested in the money. Not that we recommend you being that way, but I'm saying if you get past the ethical and you're just not an ethical person, you'd still think you'd be interested in the practical ramifications.
Raj Lulla:
Which is one of the interesting things, because that's actually where a lot of these regulations come from, is people just trying to access your services or your goods, and being not able to access them, and being frustrated and understandably disappointed.
Ben Lueders:
Not able to get into your coffee shop because there's no wheelchair ramp, those kinds of things. Those are the ones that you maybe heard about a decade or more ago a lot, but exactly. They're just trying to do what everyone else is doing. It's not too much to ask.
Raj Lulla:
So there's the ethical reason, not discriminating against people, there's the practical reason of getting as many customers as possible, and then there's a whole list of legal reasons why this is going to be necessary for you.
In 2020, there were 265,000 website accessibility letters that were sent, and a study by accessibility.com estimates the costs of the legal fees and remediation of those 265,000 website demand letters to be between 1.3 and 6.6 billion dollars.
Ben Lueders:
Billion with a B.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, billion dollars, and what's crazy is that that happened kind of under the cover of darkness, where... This wasn't in headlines. Now, partly because it was in 2020 and we had a lot of other things to deal with, but you weren't seeing constant headlines being like, "Well, this business just got sued. This business just got taken to court," and I'm not really sure why that is, again, other than maybe just the more loud headlines at the time kind of drowning it out, but yeah, there are 265,000 website accessibility demand letters sent in 2020, and this is only going up year over year.
Ben Lueders:
Oh yeah, it's been like a 300% increase or something since 2016.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, 2016, 2020, and then it was another 71% increase in the first half of 2021, I believe it was somewhere in that neighborhood, and so yeah, this is only going to continue, and on top of that, each one of these infractions can carry a $4,000 fine, and so it's easy to see how between the court costs and the fee itself, you're easily talking 10 grand minimum before this issue is taken care of, and it's super preventable too, which we'll talk about in a little bit, but it's just not necessary to have to incur that kind of cost and also incur the kind of public black eye for being known for being inaccessible.
Ben Lueders:
This isn't just... You know, you may be hearing this and being like, "Okay, this is someone else's problem. This is happening."
Raj Lulla:
Apple, Nike, you know the big guys.
Ben Lueders:
Those big companies in big cities or whatever. I literally just ran into a local design friend here in the Midwest just a couple weeks ago at a Starbucks, and was just checking in on how things were going, and the first thing that he says, he had no idea that we were going to do this podcast, but he was just saying like, "Oh no, it's been really hard because their company has been in the middle of this big lawsuit, because they were sued because their website was not accessible," and I was like... I couldn't believe it. This is happening to people right around us, and you could just tell it took the wind out of his sails, and it really, really affected the company and demanded a lot of their time and attention. They've completely redone their website as well, and it's better now, but we don't want you to have to face that.
Raj Lulla:
No.
Ben Lueders:
That is no fun.
Raj Lulla:
Business is hard enough without having to deal with a lawsuit. We've been keeping an eye on this for the last few years, and if you're coming at us like, "Well, why didn't you tell us?", part of the reason is that the law was not really settled. It's still not a hundred percent settled, but there's definitely some good pointers that help us to know which direction to go now. Before the standards weren't a hundred percent settled, so even if we had wanted to help you understand how to make every website accessible, it wasn't clear. There was also confusion for a while about whether a website had to be accessible if the business did not have a physical presence.
One of the first lawsuits in this area, at least that I became aware of, was... I can't remember if was... I think it was Piggly Wiggly, because I remember it being a funny name grocery store, and I don't think it was Hinky Dinky.
Ben Lueders:
I was going to say, was it Hinky Dinky, or did Hinky Dinky become Piggly Wiggly? I can't remember.
Raj Lulla:
There's a whole great episode John Green did about this in the Anthropocene Reviewed podcast, but I think it was Piggly Wiggly. They ran a coupon that was only available in their digital flyer, and someone with an accessibility felt discriminated against, or argued that they were being discriminated against, because they couldn't access that coupon on the website because they couldn't access through the website, and so therefore, it was literally costing this person more money to do business with this grocery store.
If it wasn't Piggly Wiggly, Piggly Wiggly lawyers, please don't contact us. Whoever it was...
Ben Lueders:
Hinky Dinky.
Raj Lulla:
It doesn't matter, because there's actually been lots of grocery store chains who have been sued for the same. Kroger, Hy-Vee, there's been a lot of settlements. So pretty much all the major chains have dealt with this stuff, and at that time, the guidance was if you have a physical presence, then your website is considered a place of public accessibility.
That is no longer the case, at least it's not seeming to be that case anymore. The Department of Justice recently revamped their own website, and they also launched a brand new website for the ADA, and they've started issuing more guidance on website accessibility for government agencies. This actually has been going since about 2003.
Ben Lueders:
It's been that long?
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, and the guidance has gotten more and more clear as we have gone, and now we're to the point where the DOJ is saying that certainly all government websites have to be places of public accessibility, but what has happened in the past is that anything that goes into that categories that's called Title II under the ADA, I believe, then often gets applied almost directly to Title III, which would be private businesses and organizations.
So this seems really likely to be fully required by law very soon. The White House has made their position a hundred percent clear that they want to move in this direction, and kind of regardless of whether or not the current administration stays in power, these things are going to keep moving. Obama was leading the charge on this for a while, and then it slowed down a little during Trump, but then the Biden White House has started pushing it forward again. So even if you buy a couple of years, the trend just doesn't go backwards on this.
Ben Lueders:
Right, right, right.
Raj Lulla:
I would not count on that, and again, why would you want to? It's not a great look that you really hope that you don't have to do this, and I don't think anybody who's listening really [inaudible 00:19:42].
Ben Lueders:
I don't think they're thinking that. I would imagine you'd be more like me, which was just like, "Oh, it's just overwhelming." Yeah, and I think the other thing, too, is for those of us who haven't been thinking this way for our businesses, is like there's so many different disabilities out there, and there's so many different... How do I make sure that I'm hitting all these marks? It seems almost like a overwhelming moving target, and I remember one of my first thoughts was like, "Man, I'm going to have to make... All of my websites are just going to have to be black and white and text only and Helvetica and that's it," which is not true.
Raj Lulla:
Not only that, that wouldn't help dyslexia, those kinds of things. So it's hard to even balance, "How do I make things right for all different types of disabilities?", and again, to Ben's point, this isn't just happening with major corporations. Local companies, as I mentioned, Hy-Vee, which is based here in the Midwest, has had to deal with some pretty major legal action. There was a story about breweries on the West coast being targeted, and I hate to even use the word "targeted". Unfortunately, there are some folks out there who do just go around issuing demand letters to businesses, but a lot of these letters are also just asking people to do the right thing, and so even if the person is doing it for a reason that benefits them financially, the overall issue is that this is something we need to deal with, and it's just the right thing to do.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, absolutely. So it's led to the big question, which is, "What should I do? What do I do now that I have this overwhelming sense of responsibility and a little bit of dread?"
Raj Lulla:
You're the designer, so it's completely your problem. The short answer is make your website accessible as soon as possible.
Ben Lueders:
It's easy.
Raj Lulla:
There are a couple of ways to do this. There are ADA guidelines available, and we're going to drop some links in the show notes here, but there are a lot of links to parse through. The guidelines can be a little bit extensive, and you do have to follow them to the letter. That is why we've actually recommended taking a different approach, and so Ben, why don't you talk about what that approach is?
Ben Lueders:
So instead of completely redesigning every site from the ground up and trying to take every single disability in mind, we chose to partner with over the top plugin for your website that actually makes your website accessible to all different disabilities and helps it become accessible and follow all the 88 guidelines, and the way that works is, with this plugin installed on your website, someone who is accessing your website who has a disability can simply select the disability that they have, and it completely, with a click of a button, or the prompt of your voice or your keyboard or whatever you're using to access the website, the whole site, the design changes to match that impairment, and so it's kind of like magic. It's amazing how it works, and even if, for example, you don't have the proper alt text on images, you haven't typed that in yourself using this plugin that we use, it actually will add in really good AI generated alt text, things like that.
Raj Lulla:
I guess we've used the term alt text before. So an easy way to tell if you have alt text correctly on your website, or even what it is, if you hover over an image on your website with a mouse, and then you get that kind of yellow bar that pops up right next to your mouse, and if your alt text was done correctly, if there was an image of me and Ben here, it would be, "There's a Caucasian male with great hair on the left side."
Ben Lueders:
Handsome.
Raj Lulla:
"There's a Indian male on the right side who is..."
Ben Lueders:
Also handsome.
Raj Lulla:
"Maybe a little shorter, and there is a television behind them with a black screen and logo."
Ben Lueders:
We're about the same height right now.
Raj Lulla:
But it would actually have a description of the image that you're seeing right now, or if you were weren't listening and actually watching, that's what you would see.
So that's one way you can check, see if your website already has alt text, and if it's kind of already complying with those things. If you don't, again, it's great, because with over the top plugin, like the one that we're going to be using on... That we already use on our site and are going to use on all of our client sites, then you don't even have to write those descriptions. I've noticed that on Twitter and other social media platforms, people have been trying to accommodate this themselves, and literally with every tweet or with every post on Facebook, they write alt text, and the best person at this, by the way, is a comedian from the UK named Sarah Millikin, who writes really funny ones, because at the beginning, she always says, it's in parentheses, and it says, "For all the visually impaired smashers out there", which is kind of like rock stars. I just love that she describes it that way, and then the text is often funnier than the post itself. So good job, Sarah, great work on that.
Alt text is just one of the many, many things that people have to do. Between colors, fonts, all of those things, you do, in some ways, kind of have to basically completely redesign your website for each of these different needs, and that's why we have chosen that second route of an over the top plugin, because it's easier for our clients and more affordable for our clients than making multiple different versions of their websites.
Ben Lueders:
Oh, absolutely.
Raj Lulla:
Or going through hours and hours of compliance research, because the other problem is things change.
Ben Lueders:
Oh yeah.
Raj Lulla:
So do we want to have to be calling every time and say, "Hey, this new regulation is up, we need to fix this for you," all of that, but instead relying on an accessibility focused company that... They even give you a little certification that says you're compliant to lean on, because they're experts in the field, and that's fantastic.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, I'd totally recommend... Go to our website right now, fruitful.design, and you can see right in the bottom right-hand corner, there's this little green guy. If you click on that, you'll see all the different options, the different disabilities that that plugin can cater to. Just go ahead and play around with it. Click on it. Explore it a little bit, and you can see how it changes the site depending on what you click, and so this will help you not have to rebrand because of this and change all of your brand colors and all this stuff. All of that stuff can be included with the click of a button with this plugin.
Raj Lulla:
That's going to make your website more usable for more people, which, again, is just the right thing to do. We're also going to try to include some screenshots or screen recordings in this episode if you're watching it, just being able to see what it does, but again, we do really recommend just going and playing with it yourself so that you can get accustomed to the value that this brings to your site, and it's so easy and unobtrusive, you don't even really notice it's there unless you need it, which is the point. That's the great thing about it.
For anybody who is on one of Fruitful's monthly website maintenance plans, we're going to be adding this plugin and maintaining it at no additional charge. For everybody else, you can either sign up for one of our maintenance plans, or we can help you to get this installed with just a kind of one-off engagement.
We would love, of course, to do this for free for everybody, but there's quite a lot of designer developer time going into getting stuff installed correctly, and then if we are the ones who are continuing to maintain that for you, make sure that the plug-in stays up, then, of course, that just takes some time, and for whatever reason, our people like to feed their families and have lives and homes and all those things.
There is, however, some great news, and you are the happiest person on this podcast. So do you want to share the great news?
Ben Lueders:
I think you're really happy, Raj. I don't know. I just smile more. I love sharing great news, Raj.
So it turns out there's a tax credit available right now that gives you back 50% of what you spend on accessibility upgrades to your website up to $5,000.
Raj Lulla:
So if you spend $10,000, which is, by the way, not what we charge to upgrade your website, then you can get up to $5,000 back as a tax credit. I will say it's a non-refundable tax credit. So the government's not going to write you a check for $5,000, but if your business ends up owing taxes anyway, you might as well take $5,000 off of that by getting a tax refund or however that works exactly, but again, we're not your lawyer or your accountant, so tax credits work however tax credits work.
Ben Lueders:
Although it's somewhat unfortunate that sometimes it takes the threat of a lawsuit to make us do the right thing, this is the right thing to do, though. I know we said it a minute ago, but we just want to reiterate, we're not trying to scare people into doing business with us, but this is the way that our country, our world is going. It's a good direction.
Raj Lulla:
You should.
Ben Lueders:
We are for it, and it's really to help better serve those in our community who are underserved, and so it's the right thing, even though there's a little bit of scary lawsuit stuff in the balance as well for us businesses. So yeah.
Raj Lulla:
We've been working for a long time with an organization called the Meyer Foundation for Disabilities here in Omaha, and they focus on helping adults with disabilities, because what happens is they age out of the school system and they lose access to all the resources that schools offer, special education classes, those types of things, and one of the first times we met with a gal named Mary McHale, who's deeply involved with Meyer Foundation.
She told us that we were too young to remember what life was like before these accommodations started taking place, and I asked her what she meant, because I remember all of the folks that I grew up with in the Miller Public Schools here, many of whom were in our classes, and sometimes they needed special speech therapy or physical therapy, that kind of stuff, but were learning alongside us, and Mary had talked about how prior to that, and not very long prior to that, because we're both children of the eighties, so not very long before we were in school, a lot of these people were institutionalized.
It was just kind of a sentence that if you were born with a disability, you would end up in an institution, and thankfully, that's not the world we grew up in. There are many people who have made my life richer who have disabilities that would've been institutionalized, and so on top of all of this, it's worth remembering that the Americans with Disabilities Act is actually not that old. In March of 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act stalled in Congress. It looked like it wasn't going to get passed, and so protestors with disabilities and their families showed up at the Capitol building in Washington to demand that Congress take action.
Ben Lueders:
They actually got out of their wheelchairs and started crawling up the steps of the Capitol. We were looking this up, and it was kind of a... It's a crazy thing to see, and it apparently made a big impact.
Raj Lulla:
Their protest became known as the Capitol Crawl, and just four months later, in July of 1990, the ADA was passed into law.
When we make changes like this as a country, it is ultimately for our good. What we do for people who have the greatest needs among us, we're really doing for ourselves. It's reminding each other that we will protect each other and stand up for each other. So let's grow fruitful brands. Let's not wait until demand letters or lawsuits force us into action. Let's make our websites accessible, and let's grow something good together.
Ben Lueders:
Thanks for joining us today on Growing a Fruitful Brand. If you found today's show helpful, don't forget to subscribe and consider sharing it with someone who might also enjoy it. If you'd like to work with Fruitful on a branding website or messaging project of your own, you can always reach out on our website, fruitful.design. So until next time, don't forget to grow something good.
