CDO | Digital UX & Marketing
How ADA Compliance Improves your UX

Prioritize Fixes

Ensure your team has strategic visibility to address existing barriers, and prevent creating new ones.

When addressing accessibility barriers, impact and effort must be assessed – the impact the barrier is having on people with disabilities, and the effort required for repair. For each barrier, the following must be determined:

• Impact on people with disabilities. The actual impact on users of a specific barrier depends on the context of your site. For example, poor color contrast in the main content has high impact on some people with disabilities, whereas in generic footers it may have low impact.
• Effort required for repair. The time, cost, and skills to repair a barrier varies greatly based on parameters such as the type of repair and your development environment.

After you have repaired the major accessibility barriers on your website, there are several processes you’ll need to implement to help avoid creating new barriers and to continue improving the accessibility of your site.

Inclusive Design

Convey and extend your brand purpose through digital accessibility compliance.

Your brand has a “why”; a statement of purpose that tells the world what you do, and who you serve. Creating marketing collateral that meets WCAG/ADA digital accessibility standards doesn’t just put you on the right side of the law – it helps you extend your brand to engage communities you may not have been reaching before.

Become the agent of change who makes your enterprise more accessible to the world and brings higher purpose to the daily work of your teams.

VPAT

Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates

A properly completed VPAT should break down everything that you’re doing regarding product accessibility in an incredible level of detail. Based on this document, your product will be given one of the following levels:

• Supports. This means that you either meet all the specific factors dictated by the Revised Section 508 Standards in a very literal way, or you accomplish the same goals by way of “an equivalent facilitation.”
• Partially Supports. As the term suggests, this means that you meet a majority of the criteria in the Revised Section 508 Standards, but there may still be certain “known defects” (read:things you have to work on) that are present.
• Does Not Support.This describes a situation where the majority of your product’s functionality does not meet the Revised Section 508 Standards in any way, shape or form.