Why make your website accessible?

In the U.S. alone:

1. 4 million people have a visual disability
2. 5 million people have a hearing disability
3. 9 million people have an ambulatory disability
4. 8 million people have a cognitive disability

If your website isn’t ADA compliant, you’re preventing millions of visitors from enjoying a positive experience on your site.

In addition to ensuring your site provides a great User Experience, there’s a link between website accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO).

Compliance can boost your SEO

Ultimately, making your website ADA compliant can aid your SEO efforts.

ADA compliant design aims to improve site relevance, time on site, and UX (User Experience) — all factors which impact your SEO.

Our ADA compliance services can boost your site’s relevance, improve UX, and encourage people to spend more time on your site. All of these things send positive signals to search engines, like Google, and can boost your rankings to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

Without an accessible, easy-to-use site, you risk losing valuable SEO traffic, leads, and revenue.

Legal issues for non-compliant sites

Although federal agencies have been required to make their sites accessible to people with disabilities since 1998, it was not until fairly recently that anyone took action against non-compliant sites. This changed when the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) started bringing attention to the issue.

In the past few years, they’ve filed Section 508 lawsuits against several major agencies and businesses, including the Small Business Administration, the Social Security Administration, and the US Department of Education.

These federal agencies’ sites were all inaccessible to blind Internet users and prevented them from filling out forms and accessing certain information.

Privately-owned businesses and corporations have also been subject to accessibility lawsuits. In 2006, for example, the NFB, NFB of California, and a blind college student filed a lawsuit against Target Corporation.

Target’s site was inaccessible to blind users, and did not allow them to access information or make purchases. This violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the court ruled in favor for the NFB.

This set a precedent for online retailers, and as this becomes more of a well-known issue, there are likely to be similar lawsuits in the future for websites that are inaccessible to customers with disabilities.

In fact, some individual citizens have started filing their own lawsuits over ADA violations in recent years. Between 2012 and 2015, one blind man in Beaver County filed 66 lawsuits against various businesses with inaccessible sites – and has “reached confidential settlements” with every single one.

The companies he sued ranged from clothing retailers to banks to auto repair shops, demonstrating that regardless of industry, any business could be at risk for lawsuits over ADA violations.