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In June of 2017 the number of internet users reached 3.8 billion (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) and the total number of websites reached 1.2 billion in August of the same year (https://hostingfacts.com/internet-facts-stats-2016/). With more and more information, and services offered online, disabled individuals continue to find themselves left-out due to the lack of businesses making their websites accessible. Enhancing the ability for disabled individuals to access online companies, search for jobs, buy merchandise and services, or access information has become a primary focus of governments and businesses worldwide. Governments have recognized their social responsibility to make information technology accessible to individuals with disabilities. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), has been expanded to include the internet. In 2010, the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 expanded the ADA even further by adding video programming and producers of online video content as well as Internet Protocol-based communications. Furthermore, businesses with 15 or more employees must now comply with Title I of the ADA when training, recruiting and hiring employees online. With 20% of the internet users (one in five) being disabled, the business case for ensuring that a company’s website is accessible to individuals with a disability is obvious and justifies investing in a website accessibility testing tool or service. A leading provider of an automated ADA website compliance checker is AuditGenie.com. For as little as $97 you can scan a 250-page website and receive detailed reports on a variety of coding errors that make your website inaccessible. As businesses continue to make strides to ensure that enhancement of a disabled individuals user experience and access to websites continues, the opportunities for these individuals will increase as well. Companies like IBM and GE continue to be leaders in the initiative to remove barriers and improve and enhance the web experiences for individuals with visual, physical, cognitive, neurological and other disabilities. Thousands of companies are now using web-based real-time accessibility Section 508 compliance checkers and with affordable ADA compliance checker pricing to scan and test their websites for accessibility issues.
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One of the main web content accessibility problems people with screen readers, like JAWS, is a poorly coded and marked up a website which fails to follow coding best practices. These best practices are still very new to the majority of web designers. In general terms, a page will be easier to navigate if it is built correctly; however, there are a few things you can do to make it even easier for people with disabilities to navigate and improve the overall ADA accessibility of your website. Making your website accessible to individuals with disabilities starts with using and ADA website accessibility testing tool. A robust ADA checker will identify accessibility issues that should be corrected on your website, these issues/errors follow the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guideline. The Web Accessibility Guidelines that we will cover in this blog post are WCAG 2.0 and will assist you in providing alternatives to avoid “Bypass Blocks”, these “Blocks” could be associated with headers, navigation and other sections or elements of your web pages. Related Article: ADA Website Compliance Checker Correct Usage of Headings To start, it is important that you use correct of headings in your content. You can indicate the main content, as well as the navigation, of your website with the “h1” heading, using “h1” makes the most sense when creating the markup navigation section, the reason being, that it can be considered an independent section of the website, and is not part of the content. My experience has been that the majority of web designers use a subheading, which is considered to be semantically incorrect, most of the time. The main reason for this is to attempt to improve SEO. If you conduct a keyword search for “multiple h1s, the search will return suggestions to only use one “h1” heading for each page. This practice is to limit techniques like keyword stuffing. Related Article: What is it like for Disabled Users to Navigate My Website? When placing content on your web pages, think of them as a dynamic and interactive, often times web pages are thought of and created as a document, so the practice of having one “h1” heading is used. I would suggest, that because a web page is dynamic, it is a valid standard to have multiple subjects on a web page, each having an “h1” heading. This may also be the case where excerpts are used with links to the full content. As mentioned above, headings help disabled individuals that use assistive technology, such as screen readers, to navigate your website. Using headings correctly allow these individuals to quickly navigate your website and find the content that is of interest to them. A best practice would be to include headings above navigation sections. Your navigation should be contained in a list, this both allows for richer styling through CSS, and improves the accessibility of your navigation. The benefit of this is that when a screen reader encounters a list, it basically reads up "list of x links", which will help the user make a decision as of what action to take. In closing, ensure that you use your headings with the end user in mind, test your website with an ADA accessibility website compliance checker, be cognizant of individuals with disabilities that use assistive technology to access your website. Correcting the navigation issues that you have identified will ultimately mean more visitors and better SEO. |