Is your website AODA and WCAG compliant? An estimated 56 million Americans and 4 million Canadians are living with some sort of disabilities, many of whom may currently be unable to access your website. This not only diminishes your audience size but may put you at risk of violating accessibility legislations in Canada and the US.
In Canada, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) was introduced to develop, implement, and enforce new standards for accessibility in the province. The AODA outlines ways in which building structures, work conditions, and websites for Ontario businesses will need to be modified to accommodate accessibility needs.
Since these changes were proposed, all businesses and organizations have had to implement new AODA requirements each year. These changes require all organizations to design their website and content to be compatible with assistive technology and in line with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Nobody is exempt from these changes; eCommerce businesses and those without traditional “customers” will still need to comply with informational and workplace accessibility standards for their vendors, suppliers, and consultants.
Your company’s website needs to be assessed, modified, and tested for AODA and WCAG compliance. If you did not explicitly ask your developer to incorporate accessibility features, or are using common template software to design your website, then it is highly likely that there are accessibility issues that need to be resolved.
Do you have a strong compliance strategy?
The WCAG requires that any website that has been modified or created after January 1st, 2014 conforms to specific accessibility standards. Your company’s website must have an appropriate layout with dynamic sizing options, clear and concise content, and be fully compatible with assistive technologies such as screen readers.
Our team of experts can ensure your company’s AODA and WCAG compliance with our 3-step process:
- We assess your AODA and WCAG compliance.
We manually assess your website to identify potential issues. We make sure that links are functional, alternate image (alt) text is meaningful and descriptive, and content is presented in an optimal way. Additionally, we test whether or not your website is compatible with assistive technology.
- We modify your website to optimize accessibility.
Once we have identified the issues, our team takes action. We add larger text options, refine content for clarity, caption videos, and change alt text so that screen readers don’t narrate unhelpful default file names (e.g. 360aoda.jpg). We modify page design for strong text/background contrasts to help colourblind individuals, and add handy zoom/sizing settings for people who have impaired vision.
- We test the user experience.
During our final step, we test for errors by adopting the user’s perspective and browsing the site in a way that mimics their experience. We run automatic assessments to flag unresolved issues, then view your site through assistive technology screens. We gather and analyze user feedback, and review key report data to make any additional changes that may be required.
