10 Steps Towards ADA Accessibility

With the increased reliance of the Internet for the dissemination and distribution of information, ADA Section 508 is becoming increasingly more important. Section 508 is a federal law, passed with the ADA Accessibility Act, requiring websites to be fully accessible to all users, regardless of a user’s visual, motor skill or hearing disabilities.

ADA Accessibility Guidelines

With the developments in Internet technologies, it is becoming vital to consider ADA Accessibility during the initial planning and development stages of any website project.

Here are 10 steps to making your website ADA Accessible:

1. Provide text alternatives to content displayed in images. Screen readers, used by blind users to actually ”listen” to the website, are quite adept at reading simple text on a website, but cannot yet read images accurately.
2. Provide video transcripts. Screen readers cannot yet accurately subtitle videos “on the fly”, so providing a transcript for a video can help deaf users understand the content of the video through a brail reader.
3. Don’t use color to display meaning. Asking a user to refer to the “green” bar in a graph to interpret other color-based information will render the content virtually useless to a color blind individual.
4. Ensure that the website displays properly without a stylesheet. Using web development best practices, this won’t be a problem and will allow assistive technologies that don’t render a stylesheet to still interpret the website’s content correctly for the user.
5. Frames and image maps. In most situations, you wouldn’t want to use these anyway, but if you do, ensure that they are titled properly within the HTML code.
6. Data tables. First off, make sure that you’re not using tables to control the presentation of the layout. It’s a misuse of the table tag and can cause significant problems for screen and brail readers. If you do have a data set, it is appropriate to use tables, but make sure that you properly identify the row and column headers within the HTML.
7. Don’t cause flickering. If the screen is flickering between 2HZ and 55HZ, you have a problem. In almost all cases, this will not be an issue. However, quickly flashing colors repeatedly is a surefire way to violate this portion of Section 508.
8. Provide links to necessary downloads. When your site requires that a user have a software or plugin outside of a web browser, ADA guidelines request that you link to a site where the user can download the software necessary to render the content. In most cases, this will be a link to Adobe Acrobat or FoxitReader for PDFs or Microsoft Word or Open Office for Word or Excel documents.
9. Skip repetitive navigation. You’ve probably experienced this very problem while mobile browsing. If a site contains dozens or hundreds of navigation links, it becomes very tedious to scroll past those on each page. Now imagine a screen reader reading each of those links before it finally gets to the content you’re actually interested in hearing. A simple ‘Skip to content’ link on each page is an easy solution and a big usability improvement.
10. Provide duplicate content for AJAX. AJAX is everywhere these days, however, screen readers and brail readers in most situations cannot accurately interpret content delivered through JavaScript or AJAX. In those situations, instead of simply requiring JavaScript, Section 508 requirements state that the website must deliver the same content and functionality, but without requiring JavaScript. In other words, use JavaScript to enhance the website, not to build the website.

Additional ADA Accessibility Resources

The full list of Section 508 requirements can be found here: http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=12#Web

A great guide to understanding the human side of Section 508 can be found here: http://diveintoaccessibility.org/