how to Make a WordPress Website ADA Compliant
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Chris Granat
- October 28, 2022
Contents
What is ADA Compliance?
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in 1990, and it prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life. This includes websites. In recent years, there have been a number of lawsuits brought against companies with inaccessible websites, and the trend is likely to continue. As a result, it’s important for all website owners—including those who use WordPress—to make sure their sites are compliant with ADA standards.
How to Ensure Your Website Adheres to ADA Compliance
When hiring a web design company to design and build a website, it is critical to ensure that the site will be ADA compliant. The Internet is full of sites that are not ADA compliant. To avoid having your website inaccessible to people with disabilities, you should take these steps:
1. Make Sure Content Is Readable
One of the key factors in ADA compliance is making sure that your content has enough space between lines and within columns, so that your text doesn’t become overly crowded or difficult to read. Also it’s very important to have high-contrast text against a background color.
2. Add ALT Text to Images
When designing your website, it is important to be diligent about adding alt tags to every image you upload. Not only does this help improve your site’s accessibility for people with visual impairments, but it can also benefit your search engine optimization efforts by improving the ranking of your site in search engine results. To make this process easier, many WordPress plugins have tools that will automatically add alt text to your images or let you designate them as “decorative,” meaning that they do not actually serve any real purpose on the page. So if you want to save yourself some potential headaches down the road and maximize the effectiveness of your site’s images, be sure to add alt tags to all of the images on your pages and posts.
WordPress Plugins That Will Make Your Website ADA Compliant
Thankfully, there are a number of WordPress plugins that can help you do just that. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at three of the best plugins for creating an ADA compliant WordPress website.
This popular WordPress compliance plugin provides a number of features to help make your website more accessible. These include adding ARIA landmark roles, adding keyboard navigation for drop-down menus, and enqueueing the correct stylesheet when needed.
2. Color Contrast Checker:
It’s important to make sure that the colors you use on your website have sufficient contrast. For example, white text on a black background may be difficult for some users to read, while light gray text on a white background may be equally challenging. This plugin helps you check the color contrast of your site to ensure that it meets WCAG 2.0 guidelines. After you’ve installed the plugin, simply click on “Tools” > “Check Contrast” in your WordPress dashboard to get started.
3. Accessible Poetry:
This plugin is designed to help make your website more accessible to people with low vision or blindness. It does this by adding alternative text to images and videos, as well as by providing text transcripts of audio content. These features make your site much easier to navigate for those using screen readers.
ADA Compliance: Final Thoughts
Making sure your WordPress website is designed for best ADA compliance standards is important not only to avoid potential lawsuits but also to ensure that everyone can access and enjoy your site. The cost of updating your website for compliance is definitely less expensive than potential court costs. Thankfully, there are a number of great plugins available that can help you make your site more accessible. In this blog post, we looked at three of the best plugins for creating an ADA compliant website. Do you have any other favorite plugins for making a WordPress site more accessible?
Chris Granat
Chris is the founder and lead web designer at Flamingo Agency, a Chicago web design firm.
