In terms of ensuring accessibility, we can see that the need is immense for websites to ensure compliance with ADA accessibility regulations. This is needed to ensure legal compliance and avoid penalties and reach more prospective users. Accessibility is also regarded as a tool to engage with more people and enhance business prospects. This article may discuss some ways to ensure web accessibility and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Accessibility compliance measures – AccessiBe
Let us further explore some definitive ways, as explained by AccessiBe, to ensure accessibility compliance for business websites.
1. Using descriptive URLs
For people with blindness and other vision problems, screen readers can read the page content descriptively and quickly. If the URLs are made descriptive, it will be easy for blind users to easily understand the web page’s context. Descriptions should also be made meaningful to make it easier for the users to skip the unwanted and reach for the content they need. Say, for example, while describing the URL link for the About page, you may consider the following things.
- Avoid low readability: Say, for example, www.compnayname.com/about.
- Ensure high readability and better understanding: for example, www.companyname.com/about-the-company name.
- Avoid using any generic anchor text such as just “Click Here” or “Read More” on the page.
Also, you may not use any links to the images which cannot support Alt Text.
2. Use the ARIA roles
ARIA is the standard that represents the Accessible Rich Internet Applications. This tag will help make dynamic web content more accessible and easier to interpret for assistive devices. ARIA attributes and roles offer more information and context about the website elements by specifying the screen readers and other assistive tools. It is easy for the developers and designers to specify the ARIA rule by using the attribute as role=”<ROLE TYPE>.” The most common ARIA role categories are:
- Landmark: Assistive roles interpret it for navigation.
- Document Structure: This role offers a description of the structure in a specific section.
- Widget: This describes the interactive elements lacking semantic equivalents on the HTML tags.
- Abstract: Helping to organize and streamline the documents.
- Window: Help creates subcategories or subsections of the primary document.
- Live Regions: helps in assistive tools for detection of any dynamic content which changes on the webpage and provides alerts to the disabled users.
3. Avoid the usage of placeholder text on web forms.
Web page forms tend to use placeholder text to describe different elements on the forms and save more space. But such placeholder text is given in gray usually, and visually impaired people may not be able to read it. This is also non-labeled text, and the screen readers may skip the holder text. So, blind people and screen interpreters may not be able to read this text. So, instead of using placeholder text in gray, you may use the ARIA attribute or <label>.
So, as described by AccessiBe, you now know three definite ways to enhance accessibility, which you can make use of on your website to ensure accessibility and ADA compliance.
