Living life as a Person with Disability (PWD) can be challenging. And not being able to experience the same benefits as abled people only makes it more challenging for PWDs.
That’s why the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 or ADA was implemented to help level the playing field.
Unfortunately, not uncommonly, many websites are ADA compliant, for several reasons. Chief among them is the cost and complexity of implementing protocols that fit ADA’s guidelines.
What is accessiBe, and what can it do for you?
accessiBe is a fully automated web accessibility solution that helps you assess your website so that it could meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 and ADA standards.
What it does is it uses AI to comb through your website and analyze which parts/elements are not compliant with the web accessibility standards so it can make the necessary adjustments.
Sounds complicated?
Well, in reality, it isn’t.
accessiBe makes it a point to let even non-technical users utilize its service without needing to write a single piece of code.
Once you have it integrated on your site, accessiBe’s AI automatically checks your website every 24 hours for any changes to make sure that your website is compliant at any time of the day.
accessiBe not only helps your disabled customers navigate your site with ease, but it also protects your company from potential lawsuits brought upon by non-compliance.
Domino’s Pizza, for example, was sued by a disabled customer because the would-be customer couldn’t order Pizza through their site.
If a considerable restaurant chain isn’t safe from legal actions like that, then no company is either. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
What can it do for your customers?
Using its tools, users can manipulate how the frontend elements of your website will look based on their preferences.
Here are some useful tools that help your customers out:
Content Adjustments
From a Text Magnifier to a real-time font changer, users would be given the ability to adjust how the content looks on your site so that they can browse them comfortably.
They wouldn’t need to squint just to read small letters or suffer from hard-to-read blocks of text; users would now have the power to look at content the way they deserve.
Users can also take advantage of the alignment tools to help them adjust the spacing to fit their needs. Even content can be scaled up so they could easily be seen.
Color & Display Adjustments
accessiBe doesn’t just stop with the spacing and the font size; it has tools that could change the colors and contrast to make reading a whole lot easier for everyone.
Studies have shown that poor color choice sends users off websites 52% of the time. While it’s great to be able to define your color scheme, it would be beneficial for all to give users the power to change it to what best suits them — especially for your website visitors who are visually impaired.
Plus, there’s no limit to the customization. Users are given the ability to change the color of any element on your site, be it text or background.
This effectively eliminates any discrimination against people with colorblindness or have trouble seeing specific colors.
Navigation Adjustments
accessiBe offers a plethora of other useful tools that could help users navigate through your site with ease.
From Letter Navigation to hiding images, and even changing the color of the mouse cursor, there’s a tool that could cater to everyone’s needs.
A lot of times it’s hard to navigate through a website because it’s hard to know where you’re looking at. By using “Emphasize Mouse Hover” you can easily see the sections your mouse is hovering.
Keyboard navigation is another useful tool users can use at their disposal. By using the tool, your web visitors can navigate through your site without even needing to use the mouse.
Also, if your users find it challenging to press the keys on their keyboard, they can enable the virtual keyboard when typing in web forms.
All of these excellent tools packed into one easy-to-use toolbox. You won’t even have to write a single code on your own to enable them for your site!
Whether you end up having users that are visually impaired, blind, those that have Alzheimer’s, or those with epilepsy, you can serve them better with the help of accessiBe.
How can you get this on your site?
Convinced? Great! Here’s a quick guide on how to get accessiBe up and to run in your WordPress website in no time:
- Register for an accessiBe account.
- Next, click on the “AccessiBe Embedding” tab (as seen below).
(Source)
3. Click on the “Copy to Keyboard” link under the Quick & Basic Installation section.
4. Install the “Insert Header and Footer” plugin into your WordPress website.
5. Paste the code you obtained from accessible in the “Insert Header and Footer” plugin then save.
6. Sit back and relax. Within 48 hours, your website is going to be fully compliant.
How much does it cost?
The Pro plan costs $490/year, which is suitable for websites that have lower than 1,000 pages. (You can check out their other pricing plans on their website.)
The amount accessiBe is charging is undoubtedly cheaper and more reasonable compared with its competitors. Manual web accessibility solutions cost thousands of dollars, however, as soon as your website updates or when you add new plugins or content, compliance gaps often appear.
Accessibility plugins, on the other hand, are very affordable, some are even free. However, they are often only able to fulfill 5%-20% of the requirements — making them unreliable.
As you have accessiBe fully up and running on your website, you’d be pretty much protected from ADA-related lawsuits.
All set?
You can never go wrong with future-proofing your website against ADA lawsuits. This small act would not only rid you of any future legal hassles, but it would save you from any potential headaches.
Having accessiBe’s revolutionary machine learning algorithm do the work for you guarantees that your website would be 100% compliant without the need for human intervention.
So, why wait? Get your website fully compliant now using accessiBe.
