Driving traffic to your website is a big deal. But once you get people there, actual conversions happening—heck, that’s the whole enchilada. As a digital marketing agency, one of our secret special sauces deals with getting you higher conversions. We blogged about the tips and tricks to conversions a while back but have you ever considered how accessible your site is to everyone who visits? What if your site is hindering conversions—and worse—a potential lawsuit waiting to happen? If you’re not up to ADA standards, conversions might be the least of your worries.
As you may know, ADA, or the Americans with Disabilities Act, is a law that mandates that companies and public service providers offer access to individuals with disabilities. Today, ADA applies to the internet, especially websites. This is known as web accessibility. The primary goal of website ADA accessibility is to ensure that people with disabilities must be able to experience digital content with the same outcome as those without disabilities.
WCAG Guides Us All for Good
Curious about what the current standards are for website accessibility? Look no further than WCAG—The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These recognized guidelines were created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with the purpose of setting a series of internationally shared guidelines governing the standards of web content accessibility to make websites, devices, and content accessible to users with disabilities.
You may be reading this and wondering if it’s really worth all the effort to tweak your site for ADA accessibility according to WCAG standards. When in fact, there are three main reasons you really can’t ignore when it comes to website ADA compliance.
1. Increase Engagement With Target Audiences
According to the World Health Organization, around 1.4 billion people worldwide have some type of disability. That’s 15% of the earth’s population, a number that truly can’t be ignored. If your site isn’t up to current ADA standards, you are automatically missing out on millions of potential customers who cannot access your site properly due to their disabilities.
Not sure what that looks like in real life?
Let’s take someone with a visual impairment. Say this person uses assistive technology like a screen reader to surf the internet. This technology utilizes software to convert text, buttons and images into synthesized speech, braille or both. If your site isn’t coded properly to allow all of the functionality of the text-to-speech software to work with your content, the user will become frustrated and leave your site. You just missed out on a potential customer, and quite possibly, set yourself up for a potential lawsuit.
2. Avoid Potential Lawsuits
Did “lawsuit” get your attention? We thought it might. Let’s unpack what’s going on legally with website accessibility.
Over the last few years, there’s been a surge of lawsuits filed by differently-abled users, asserting that businesses' websites were not accessible to them because they weren’t up to code with ADA.
If news like that doesn’t make you take website ADA compliance seriously, these numbers from acessiBe ought to:
- Between 2018 to 2019, there has been a 300% increase in lawsuits and demand letters against businesses regarding digital accessibility.
- An estimated 265,000 demand letters regarding ADA compliance were sent in 2020 alone.
- 93% of demand letters were settled outside of court for $20,000-$150,000 on average.
In short: your website better comply with ADA standards or you could face legal consequences and steep costs.
3. Benefits Beyond Compliance
If your website is well-structured to allow for assistive technology to work properly and coded for ADA capabilities, your business will experience many benefits beyond legalities. Consider these perks:
- Web crawlers utilize the same type of technology as assistive tech like screen readers. So if your site is up to par, web crawlers will find you quicker, boosting your overall SEO.
- PR regarding your brand is elevated because users with disabilities who visited your site navigated with no difficulties and enjoyed a pleasant experience.
- A site that’s engineered with a clear, easy-to-use structure for ADA compliance makes for a better experience for all users, regardless of disability. This encourages users to stay on your site allowing for more leads and conversions.
Conclusion
If you’re not sure if your website is ADA compliant and you’re wondering if it’s worth looking into, these advantages of doing so may convince you. If you want to safeguard your site from potential lawsuits and enhance user experience for all of your customers, now is the time to reach out. We can craft your site to be compliant from the start, audit your site to identify accessibility issues and recode it to work for all users.
Don’t let your site be a barrier to a better business experience for all. Reach out today to see how we can help.