We’ve Partnered with Website Accessibility Checker accessiBe to Help All Online Users Reach Our Clients

As a team, we have offered website design and development solutions to service-based businesses and speakers, authors, and thought leaders for over a decade. If we were to recap all of the shifts and improvements across tools and best practices in this space since then, well… this would be a very long blog post. 

Instead of a “history of website building,” we want to focus on a particular element that is currently a hot topic, and for good reason. Website accessibility is not just a matter of law (though it is that), but a matter of ensuring all users can access your website and interact with your brand. By partnering with website accessibility checker accessiBe, our team at Alter Endeavors can help our clients make their websites more available and compliant—and even boost search rankings.

Why Website Accessibility Matters

According to ADA.gov, “Inaccessible web content means that people with disabilities are denied equal access to information. An inaccessible website can exclude people just as much as steps at an entrance to a physical location. Ensuring web accessibility for people with disabilities is a priority for the Department of Justice. In recent years, a multitude of services have moved online and people rely on websites like never before for all aspects of daily living. For example, accessing voting information, finding up-to-date health and safety resources, and looking up mass transit schedules and fare information increasingly depend on having access to websites.”

The ADA website goes on to detail aspects of a website that could be considered barriers to accessibility, which are more or less in line with general do’s and don’ts when it comes to website design and development. Beyond this initial shortlist, there are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which are an international standard that focuses on making “content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these, and some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations.”

As a digital marketing agency, it’s important to us that our client’s customers can easily access information and engage—both of our businesses depend on it! As technology and accessibility requirements continue to shift, it’s impossible to anticipate and meet every single user’s needs without investing considerable time and resources into overhauling your website on perhaps an annual basis to check every WCAG box. Even so, the legal risk remains if an element does not meet WCAG standards for any amount of time.

Additional Benefits of Website Accessibility

Beyond meeting legal requirements, there are several additional benefits to having ADA-compliant website:

• Tax Credits – The U.S. government has chosen to promote and support businesses that comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), so you may be eligible for up to $5,000 in tax credits.
• SEO Improvements – Accessible websites enjoy increased traffic, reduced bounce rates, improved SEO rankings, and better conversion rates. An accessible website means that you’re making it easier for people to find your website. Check out this study from Semrush to support this claim.
  
• Brand Reputation – If inclusivity is a part of your brand messaging, ensuring your website is ADA-compliant is a way to show that you stand by that value and are willing to invest in improvements that benefit your audience.

Our Website Accessibility Solution

We recently partnered with accessiBe to bring our clients an affordable and efficient web accessibility  solution  for WCAG & ADA compliance. Through an annual license and WordPress plug-in, a widget then appears across all pages of your website, allowing a user to customize their scrolling experience according to disability. We invite you to try it out on our website, alterendeavors.com. The tool is currently active on 247,778 and counting websites, so it’s likely you’ve seen the widget before!

In building this tool, accessiBe is working side by side with the disability community to educate the business community and general public on the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They even back up their promises by providing a litigation support package in the rare case you license this tool and find yourself facing litigation.

Interested in adding this tool to your website and adhering to guidelines? Contact us today and your website can be ADA-compliant by tomorrow!