In the world of accessibility, some websites simply stand above the rest. There’s no shortage of successful accessibility implementations you can use for inspiration.
With Accessibly, one of the leading ADA and WCAG compliance widgets, every website owner and web developer has the opportunity to improve the user experience for individuals with disabilities by striving for ADA-compliant website design. This means upgrading existing site functionality with helpful tooltips, text-to-speech functionality, highly readable fonts with optimal weightage/letter spacing, and much more.
Without further ado, here are some ADA website accessibility examples and how well they do with ADA compliance:
1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
Not surprisingly, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) excels in web accessibility. It demonstrates a consistent hierarchy in titles, uses tagged clickables for assistive technology to read, and offers excellent keyboard navigation for all interactive elements.
One of its biggest strengths is readability. Font sizes and letter spacing are large and clear, and there is high contrast between text and background colors, making it easier for the visually impaired to digest the content.
Another standout feature is embedded image text captioning, which can be read by assistive technology.
All in all, we really like the HHS website for its well-rounded accessibility offerings.
2. WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind)
Web accessibility resource site WebAIM does an exceptional job with ADA compliance.
What immediately draws our attention is its excellent orientation, where all interactive elements are navigable using only a keyboard, proper tagging of menus for assistive technology, and a neat form structure with proper labeling and strong readability, thanks to excellent font size and letter spacing.
Another noteworthy aspect of WebAIM’s website is its excellent title structure, which aids individuals with disabilities and third-party screen readers in quickly finding The information they need.
3. apple.com/accessibility/
Not surprisingly, Apple’s accessibility website promoting its built-in accessibility features across products is quite impressive. It features a nice high contrast between text and background colors (all white) and focuses management features that allow users to interact with elements using only the keyboard.
Kudos to Apple’s use of the San Francisco font, which is one of the very few fonts developers can use for applications within the Apple ecosystem. It’s one of the more powerful, accessibility-friendly fonts we’ve come across, with no nonsensical decorative elements and proper spacing between characters.
4. W3.org
The official home of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the W3.org site performs well. It captures all the little details perfectly, such as explanatory text for buttons and links, as well as appropriate tagging for assistive technology to decipher. The navigational hierarchy is fairly solid, with every page containing an H1 title and other related best practices. Plus, we appreciate the strong contrast between the foreground (black and blue text) and the background (gray and white).
5. Harvard University
One of our nation’s most celebrated educational institutions has a fairly accessible website. Although it is not fully ADA-compliant (unlike the rest of the websites we’re covering), it excels in some areas, particularly with clickables and orientation.
By clickables, we mean there is proper tagging of buttons and links, ensuring compatibility with assistive technologies. Regarding orientation, focus management is on point as the website is fully navigable using the keyboard, which is great for users with limited dexterity.
In terms of the actual website layout, there is sufficient contrast between the text and background colors, making it readable for the visually impaired. We love this aspect of inclusive design, as it benefits not only the visually impaired, but all website users.
In short, these websites meet ADA compliance in many areas, particularly in the areas of clickables, navigable hierarchy, and orientation. Although they may not be fully ADA compliant, many Web Content Accessibility Guidelines best practices are evident, which is a win for full and equal participation for individuals with disabilities.
6. Any Accessibly-Equipped Site
Coming in as a complete wild card, we also nominate any website equipped with the Accessibly ADA website widget. It can help any website increase compliance with ADA and WCAG by introducing an exhaustive list of accessibility features that make it easier for individuals with disabilities to navigate.
Some of these features include, but are not limited to, larger cursors, the ability to choose high contrast text and background colors, readable fonts, highlighted links, text-to-speech functionality, and much more.
Note: Using Accessibly on its own will not make your website ADA and WCAG compliant overnight. While overlays do an excellent job of mitigating accessibility issues, they are not an end-all, be-all solution.
The best way to make a website ADA compliant is by studying the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 framework, conducting regular manual and automated testing, and encouraging inclusive design practices throughout your business or organization. We cannot stress enough conducting ongoing scans and routine maintenance to ensure that accessibility issues are addressed before any potential legal risks are in play.
Tips and Best Practices for Creating an ADA-Compliant Website
Here are some tips and best practices for creating an ADA-compliant website, whether starting from scratch with new code, accessible WordPress themes, or any site editor:
- Study the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): Before creating an ADA-compliant website, learn about the WCAG and its four accessibility principles, which are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Each of these principles guides specific best practices for how information is presented. Go inclusive design!
- Focus Management: Emphasize focus management in your accessibility best practices. This means ensuring that all website functions can be performed using only a keyboard, without the need for peripherals that require high dexterity, like a mouse or scroll wheels. Not everyone has the same dexterity levels, so providing tools to assist with navigation is crucial for equal and full participation by individuals with disabilities.
- Alternative Text for Images: Naturally, the visually impaired cannot decipher images well. As a result, they often rely on and expect alternative text for images, which are written captions “tagged” onto an image to describe it. For example, if an image of a cat appears on an accessible website, the source code would have the name of the image file (e.g., “leaping-cat.jpg”) and a descriptive “alt” attribute, such as “A black and white cat leaping over a log.” Remember, a simplistic alt text like “cat jumping over log” does not count!
- High Contrast Fore/Background Colors: Another powerful accessibility aid for the visually impaired is high contrast text and background colors. By ensuring this, it helps improve readability, offering improved clarity and legibility so that they can better direct their attention and focus. Do not underestimate this accessibility improvement as it relates to screen readers, which may rely on high contrast foreground and background to properly interpret text on a web page.
- Compatible with Assistive Technologies: Nowadays, ADA compliance extends to compatibility with assistive technologies like screen readers and magnifiers. They offer essential navigational support and additional features, such as converting text to Braille and alternative input methods like magnifiers to enlarge content on the screen.
Remember, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (as well as other accessibility guidelines in other regions) requires compatibility with these types of technologies, as they work to improve overall website and mobile application functionality for individuals with disabilities.
Benefits of Having an ADA-Compliant Website
There are numerous benefits to having an ADA-compliant website. From meeting rigorous legal obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to enhancing brand perception, it’s never too late to take charge of your website’s accessibility.
Here are some of our favorite accessibility benefits:
Meet Legal Obligations
The Americans with Disabilities Act is a piece of federal legislation that promises equal and full participation to individuals with disabilities. Any deviation from this can result in costly lawsuits and administrative fees assessed by the United States Department of Justice.
One often overlooked consequence of not adhering to the Americans with Disabilities Act is the potential loss of government contracts and funding offerings. Many local governments, municipalities, and nonprofits benefit from ADA-compliant grants, so any failure to optimize web and physical accessibility can result in lost opportunities that could severely impact a business or organization overnight.
Maintain a Strong Brand
Failure to uphold strong web accessibility practices can harm your brand perception.
For instance, in a 2012 case, Southwest Airlines faced a complaint from the United Spinal Association for not providing adequate seating accommodations for individuals with disabilities. The lawsuit resulted in a settlement where Southwest Airlines paid damages and legal fees, and committed to revising all organizational policies, especially regarding pre-boarding employee training.
This case is just one of many brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Ensure compliance by using an accessibility widget or a robust program, and regularly utilize both manual and automated tools to ensure your website or mobile application remains accessible.
Expanded Reach
With approximately 15% of the world suffering from a partial disability, applying an accessibility overlay like Accessibly will allow you to introduce new navigation features to site users (e.g., adjustable text sizes and high-contrast color options), which naturally leads to lower bounce rates, increased time on page, and potentially higher average order size and volume over time, bringing immediate dividends to your business.
SEO, SEO, and SEO
By following the ADA best practice of semantic HTML markup (e.g., proper heading tags), you will structure content and make it more readable for individuals with disabilities, also boosting your SEO. Kudos for providing descriptive alternative text and legible typography, which search engines can scan and index well.
Key Features of ADA-Compliant Websites
In order to work towards ADA compliance, keep the following accessibility features in mind:
Semantic HTML
One of the best things accessible websites are known for is properly structured semantic HTML, which allows content to be organized in a way that is easier to understand. It makes proper use of headers and subheadings to give logical sequence to content. Additionally, it allows search engines like Google and Bing to crawl and index your content, ranking you higher in search results.
Properly structured semantic HTML also allows assistive technologies like screen readers to do a better job scanning your website. As a result, you can expect several benefits such as increased organic search rankings, improved form accessibility, and future-proofing, making it easier to update accessibility over time.
Alternative Image Text
One of the most popular features for the visually impaired is alternative text for images, which is a written caption of no more than a few concise words that describe an image. There are many tools that allow for easy insertion of alternative text, such as the Accessibly ADA compliance widget, various third-party software, and even directly on e-commerce and CMS platforms like WordPress, though this approach is laborious.
Focus Management
Arguably the number one aspect when it comes to focus management is keyboard accessibility for the mobility-impaired. With the mobility-impaired often having limited dexterity and discomfort after long periods of using a mouse, focus management ensures that all website functions can be performed using the keyboard.
Video Accessibility
Do not forget about the needs of the deaf and hard of hearing when it comes to video accessibility. One of our favorite accessibility tools is text-to-speech, which converts the written word to audio. Additionally, it is important to provide captions that describe what is happening in the video.
One website that does an exceptional job of this is Netflix, which offers some of the best intuitive multi-language subtitles and closed captioning we’ve seen.
Proper Fonts
Do not underestimate the importance of readability for individuals with disabilities, as confusing fonts can be a significant barrier.
Nowadays, there are many customizable fonts focused on readability. For example, OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie are two popular fonts used for dyslexics, known for their weighted bottoms and extra spacing between characters and words to make text easier to recognize. Accessibility ADA compliance widgets like Accessibly offer insightful guidance on what it perceives as the most readable font. Do not neglect font management when it comes to your web accessibility efforts.
Text and Background Colors
One of the biggest struggles the visually-impaired face when navigating websites is low contrast between text and background colors, which makes it harder to discern characters and words. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) advocate for strong contrast ratios (e.g., black text on a white background and vice versa).
All in all, these are some of the more popular Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) best practices. We highly recommend that you review the guidelines on a regular basis to stay on top of the latest actions.
How Can Accessibly Help?
To work towards ADA & WCAG compliance, consider using Accessibly, the #1 web accessibility widget.
This accessibility widget/overlay does a great job of introducing accessibility features on websites belonging to compatible platforms e.g. Shopify.
After a quick install, your website users will be able to customize their navigational settings with the ability to enlarge content (e.g., cursors and text), adjust brightness, add reading lines/tooltips, and much more. Plus, it even comes with a text-to-voice feature where a “robot” can read out all of the page’s contents aloud, a nice-to-have for impaired individuals who cannot rely on the written word.
In addition, a recent widget redesign has introduced even more accessibility features, allowing individuals with disabilities full and complete control of their online browsing experience.
For the best accessibility, we encourage you to refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for full guidance. For example, the WCAG references automated tools for accessibility testing, which can catch accessibility issues not corrected by overlays.
Plus, Accessibly now comes with a free 7-day trial with no credit card required, allowing you to explore all of its features before committing long-term.Accessibly supports the following platforms: Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, BigCommerce, Joomla, WordPress, Magento, Elementor, WooCommerce, Drupal, Webflow, and Duda. It can also be implemented into any website using custom HTML code.
