Did you know that accessibility is technically a legal prerequisite for your website? According to Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), all public areas must accommodate people with disabilities—and this may include websites.
More importantly, designing with accessibility in mind is a decent thing to do. People with hearing, visual, and mobility impairments have a right to access your website and benefit from the wealth of information and entertainment available online.
And yet, web designers often neglect the accessibility side in their creative designs. Thankfully, specialized software like UserWay is here to help remedy design flaws that could hinder your website’s readability and accessibility.
UserWay has developed a free widget that can easily and seamlessly be integrated into your website. The widget ‘reads’ your web pages and highlights how your website can become more accessible and easier to use. It also offers a paid widget that uses AI to do all that automatically. UserWay makes sure your website is WCAG 2.1, ADA, ATAG 2.0, EN 301-549, and Section 508 compliant.
InSync specializes in web development, online marketing, branding, and SEO services. As a team, we believe that the websites we build for our clients should be easily usable by everyone. If anything, designing with accessibility in mind increases your website’s reach and audience pool. Above all, such website enhancements lead to a more inclusive, thoughtful, and caring community. That’s what we all strive for.
What Is UserWay?
UserWay increases your website’s accessibility for people with disabilities or impairments. Besides people with visual or hearing disabilities, it also increases usability for people with mobility problems, cognitive impairments, and more.
The aim of UserWay is to increase the engagement of your users without discriminating against impaired people. Toward this goal:
- UserWay audits your current website to determine whether it is compliant with the minimum accessibility requirements. It can also check whether your website complies with more stringent requirements and regulations.
- UserWay offers a free widget that can be added to any website. The widget informs web developers of common problems and miscalculations in terms of design, thus helping them remedy them. Fonts, spaces between paragraphs, contrasts, text alternatives to audio, and other similar improvements can make your website more accessible and consumer-friendly.
- UserWay has developed a full AI-powered accessibility widget that is the world’s most comprehensive automation solution for ADA compliance. The widget automatically brings code into full ADA and WCAG compliance while also providing a much richer selection of accessibility functions to your site’s users.
Importantly, UserWay’s widgets are available for all leading CMS platforms as well as plain HTML/CSS/JS sites. It also supports natively over 30 different languages, fully integrating them into the widget.
What Does UserWay Check for in a Website?
UserWay checks several areas and details in a website to make sure people with impairments have access to information in a straightforward and easily reachable way.
For example, fonts must be easy to read for people with vision impairments. Although fonts give character to designs, compliance with accessibility regulations may sometimes dictate we sacrifice some elegance in favor of practicality. Thankfully, there are several ways to combine beauty with practicality as there are many easy-to-read fonts that are aesthetically appealing, standing apart from more mainstream ones.
For visually impaired people, UserWay will notify you regarding important considerations such as the contrast between text and background and the ability to enlarge the content through the browser. It also improves your site’s support for keyboard-only navigation, enables users to independently increase content contrast on your site, increases the font size, switches to a more readable font face, uses a larger cursor, highlights links, desaturates content (removing color from text and images), and more.
UserWay also makes sure there are text alternatives to audio for people with a hearing impairment. These people will be able to read the text if they can’t hear it and therefore still obtain the information they want.
UserWay will also ensure your website is easy to navigate by people with cognitive impairment. People that get distracted easily or those who get confused by too many pop-ups may find it hard to navigate a website and find the information they are looking for.
UserWay’s widgets can help a web developer enhance the website’s functionality and de-clutter it from unnecessary bits of information that act as obstacles to some people. For example, text should be divided into smaller paragraphs to make it easy for people to scan when fast-reading. Also, bigger spaces between paragraphs and fewer if any pop-ups will help people with cognitive impairment.
As a web development company, we think these suggestions should stand true for any website, irrespective of ADA compliance. People are constantly bombarded by information. When they come to your website, they want to see clear text, neatly presented in a clean form.
Accessibility Is Not a One-off Responsibility
We have come across several websites that had initially complied with ADA and other regulations but failed to keep up their efforts as time progressed.
Compliance is not a one-off responsibility: your website evolves and you need to stay on top of new developments. When you add extra pages and new products to your website, you should keep up with compliance. New content may require new functionality.
Also, remember that technology changes and new apps and widgets can be integrated into a website to uphold its accessibility and compliance with ADA and other regulations.
This is why UserWay is a great tool for web developers to constantly and consistently check their websites for compliance, usability, and accessibility—a task that becomes infinitely easier if you choose UserWay’s paid widget that does all that automatically.
InSync and UserWay
InSync applies UserWay to the websites it develops. Our web programmers consider it their duty to help all people have full access to information, music, arts, shopping, and entertainment.
You can learn more about UserWay on the company’s website.
If you want to build a website with compliance and broad accessibility in mind, contact InSync Media online to arrange your free exploratory meeting or call us at 970-901-5216 and let us build you a website you are truly proud of!
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